Divemedic

A friend of mine worked an accident in Polk county over the weekend. Here is the news report of the accident. What I want you to note is that this was a T-bone collision of two vehicles, with the truck that ran the red light striking the Beetle on the driver’s door. The truck flipped over and came to rest on its wheels. Of the 6 occupants of the two vehicles, three of them were wearing seat belts, but the three children not wearing restraints, two ten year olds and an eight year old, were the worst off. The two ten year olds were dead, and the eight year old is probably not going to live.

The message here is wear your seatbelts. Make your passengers wear them.

This is unverified, but I just have to post this…

Here is an update to the problems with paramedic employment that I have been posting about for the last few weeks.

My girlfriend works for a large ambulance company. One of the things this company does, is provide first aid personnel to local venues that need EMS personnel standing by. One of these venues is very popular amongst the EMS personnel, as the job entails standing around and watching events the people normally pay large amounts of money to attend, and it beats riding around all night in an ambulance, tending to homeless drug abusers.

Anyway, my girlfriend has been assigned working events at this venue for the past year. Last month, her employer decided that you needed to attend a special training session if you want to keep working at this venue. Her employer claims that the 4 hour class must be taken without pay. They claim that they can do this, because the class isn’t mandatory- you don’t have to take it if you don’t want to, but they will just reassign you to the ambulance division.

I told her it is illegal, but the job market is so tight right now, she is going to take the class without pay rather than risk rocking the boat and losing her job.

That is what it is like to be a paramedic in Florida.

So I posted here about the three 15 year old black kids that beat and robbed a 13 year old white kid on a school bus in Gulfport, Florida because he refused to buy marijuana from them. The three 15 year olds broke the 13 year old kid’s arm

The three pled guilty to aggravated battery and robbery in an apparent plea deal and were sentenced to probation, community service, anger management classes, a curfew, and must wear an ankle monitor for 60 days.

We know that probation does nothing: at least one of the three black teens that killed the baseball player in Oklahoma was on probation, and even went to his scheduled appointment with his probation officer a few minutes after the murder.

The President is looking to strike Syria in the upcoming days, ostensibly as retribution for the deployment of chemical weapons against Al Qaeda terrorist rebels operating in his country, attacks that caused quite a few collateral deaths, including women and children.

He is willing to do it without British backing, and without the backing of the UN security council.There is no way for Obama to secure this permission, because the Russians have stated that they will veto any attempt to do so.

In many speeches and interviews leading up to his presidency,
then-Senator Barack Obama regularly used the death toll resulting from
America’s Middle East engagements as a campaign talking point. Back in 2007, then candidate Obama had this to say about President Bush going into Iraq without UN approval:

This president may occupy the White House, but for the last six years
the position of leader of the free the world has remained open, and it’s time to fill that role once more…The United States must build a 21st century military, in addition to showing wisdom in how we deploy it…

 The socialists of the world, and a subset of them, the US Democratic party, were absolutely critical of Bush invading Iraq, calling it “Bush’s illegal war” because he did not get the permission of the UN to use force. In an Op Ed piece in the New York Times, Obama had this to say:

“I believed it was a grave
mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al
Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent
threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more
than 4,000 Americans have died”

Senator Barack Obama, July 14, 2008

So when the cruise missiles are fired, this will become Obama’s illegal war. At least in Bush’s case, he will have gotten the permission of the US Congress. Obama’s action will be unilateral. My prediction: the Democrats will be silent.

So the next time a person asks me about Obama or Bush, I will ask them about Bush’s failure to secure UN permission, and how they feel about Obama doing the same. If the answer is “that’s different” I will tell them to shut the fuck up, adults are talking.

In response to a recent post about my brother being oblivious to crime in ethnic neighborhoods, TOTWTYTR posted this:

I hope you won’t take offense when I say that you obviously got the common sense in the family.

I am not offended, but I think that this illustrates a basic divide in how paramedics and the rest of society perceive our world. On the one hand, you have people that live their lives getting their news from the MSM, who we know filters crime reports to remove mentions of blacks committing crime. These people are the soccer parents. They are busy with work, careers, taking the kids to soccer and baseball practice, and they travel in a circle of polite company. All of their friends are basically like them (as is the case with most people). The only contact that they have with homeless people is that heartwarming story they saw in the local paper about the homeless mom with two kids, and the homeless guy that they have a dollar to yesterday. Their main experience with drug users is seeing them on shows like CSI. The only black families that they know are also professionals, and more closely resemble the Cosby or Obama family than they do the hard core gangsters of central LA. 

On the other hand, we have street paramedics. Decades of running the streets and venturing into the sorts of neighborhoods where shootings are a nightly occurrence, picking up homeless psychotics, and pushing naloxone into heroin addicts opens your eyes to what the world really is. I have seen a man murder his father to steal a couple of thousand dollars from him, a woman murder her four kids and kill herself to punish her straying husband, and I have seen men cut each other open for a cellphone. I often tell people that this is the true price that we pay for being paramedics: We lose our belief in humanity. Maybe that faith was never justified in the first place, but after a time spent watching people in their truest form, your eyes are open, and you forever look at humans differently.

After a year or two of working the streets, you see humans not as my brother and his friends do, but as the most dangerous and lethal life form on the planet. When my son began working in EMS at the age of 18, he once told me that I was burned out because I had made a remark about frequent flyer homeless bums. He said that it was time for me to find a new career, because I was jaded and didn’t have empathy. A year into his career, he told me about a guy that had been taped to a chain link fence, crucifiction style, with duct tape. The people who put him there had taped a plastic bag over his head and left him there to suffocate. Think about how cruel that is. Two years later, he was sounding exactly like I had when he called me burned out. I still chide him about that.

Looking upon man’s inhumanity to his own kind, you lose a part of your soul, like a child that loses his belief in Santa Claus, a bit of childhood innocence and wonder is gone. That loss of childhood innocence is the price we pay for being adults, just as our loss of faith in humanity is the price that paramedics pay to remain sane after seeing the things that we have seen.

My brother isn’t a moron, he is just ignorant to the world as it exists beyond his visible horizon. In some ways, this makes him naive and blind to the truth. In other ways, this is a blessing.

Graybeard points out that the issue of crime and poverty is not as much about color, but is about culture. I agree, and I think that it is deliberate. Let me explain:

Marriage is a losing proposition financially for most men. If a man is working for a living, that is. He is faced with a choice: marry a woman who works and has a career, in which case the taxes on the married couple are higher than they are on two working individuals; or marry a woman who doesn’t work, and gain the additional tax deduction at the expense of having to support someone financially and take the risk of being sentenced to a life of servitude in the event of a divorce like this poor bastard.

On the other side of the coin, the woman has little incentive to marry, either. At the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, there are all sorts of government programs and handouts that are there for the taking if you are a single mother. Subsidize something and you get more of it. At the upper end, child support is a lucrative subsidy for a single mother that has children by a wealthy man.

The stigma of fatherless children is gone. Now, being a single mother gets a woman sympathy rather than scorn. Children as young as 12 years old are striving to become pregnant, and then many of them are pushing the children off onto their own parents, and the grandparents that should be enjoying their later years are spending them raising a second generation of offspring. This is why 22% of our nation’s children are living in poverty, and the problem is getting worse. Among minorities, the problem is even more severe: 38% of black children, and 32% of Hispanic children fall below the poverty line.

The number one indicator of living a life of poverty is being born to a single parent, and the number two is being born to a parent that is under the age of 25. Nearly half of all children being born in the US are being born to unwed mothers, many of them under the age of 18. The problem becomes self perpetuating.

What is happening is that we are penalizing people for working and being
productive, and subsidizing them for creating more people who will be
dependent on government handouts. With poverty disproportionately affecting blacks, many of them see this as proof of racism and demand more handouts, thus making the problem worse. So many of them become angry at a perceived racist economy and turn to crime.