I came across this OpEd on CNN. It says a lot of what I think. This particular one is quoting Mitt Romney ranting against the President as saying, “He wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more firemen, more policemen, and more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
There are a lot of people who don’t realize that firemen weren’t always regulated by the government. In the early days of our country, you paid a subscription fee for fire services. If your home didn’t have the plaque affixed to it saying you’d paid their company, they’d stand there and watch it burn to the ground while making sure that your neighbor’s house, which did have the plaque, didn’t catch fire. Now the firemen help everyone, whether they are volunteer or employed by the government.
There are more and more 911 services where you get put in an automated queue before getting a real person because there isn’t enough funding to keep people on the phones. What if it is your child choking and turning blue, your home on fire, someone breaking into your home when you are unarmed and you get, “Please wait and the next available operator will assist you. There are five callers ahead of you.”?
When I was first married and living in Austin, I called 911 for a burglary in progress. I came home while they were there, but fortunately they bailed. My husband, who I called after calling 911, was pulled from a meeting, got to his truck over half a mile across campus, and drove the half hour from UT to our home and still beat the police to our house with enough time to completely look over the house before the patrol car pulled up in front of the house. That was for a burglary in progress! And the nearest substation was less than a mile from our house. God help me if it had been something where my life was at stake. That was 25 years ago. Austin is a lot bigger now, having done a lot of annexation and imported a lot of people. While our police force is larger, I doubt it has increased proportionately. That’s just now how these things work.
Oh, and these days, for a burglary, if it is over and done with when you call, you won’t see a police officer (and if you do, it will just be for a couple of minutes). You just get the crime scene folks. Police officers have more important things to do than worry about the scene of a domestic robbery. My home has been burgled twice and my car three times. And despite what you see on TV, we’ve never gotten a usable print. Most home surfaces just don’t take them.
I’ll leave funding schools and schoolteachers for another time as it just makes me too spitting mad and it is almost time for me to head to bed. Short version is: if our children are not worth spending money on, what is?
I was going to make this short [too late!], but I really recommend reading this article. It makes a lot of good points.
And when you deal with governmental employees, remember that every year they cut our staff, don’t give us cost of living raises, and tell us to do more with less. Eventually there will reach a point when all that can be done with less is less. Yet most of us still have a sense of service that keeps us there even while we are having trouble making the bills.
Internal Jukebox: something by Hans Zimmer. Not sure which soundtrack as they start to blur together after a while, but it’s one of the rousing portions.