Sacred Obligation, Failure Is Unacceptable

Beyond all the rules and regulations, beyond all the laws and ordinances lies a much higher and much more relevant standard of living. Back in the day before everything was catalogued and categorized, they were called natural laws, God’s laws of nature, or God’s natural law. They didn’t need to be written down, they didn’t need to be enforced; they were widely understood and mutually upheld. When they were violated, it was universally understood; no one needed to hold a grand jury, no trial was necessary, no one needed to validate or invalidate the outcome. Most of these rules you’ve understood as a child. Someone once said that no laws should be written that the average man could not read and understand. Today, we live in a society that violates that and many other natural laws with impunity.

As firefighters, we represent one of those intuitively understood natural commitments, one of those natural laws. We protect perhaps the most significant of all the natural laws: that when one of us is in danger or in need of help, help will come; that in times of trouble, there is someone you can call even if you are all alone, a stranger in a strange land; and that when we come, you are no longer a stranger, you are no longer alone, your problem is no longer just your problem-it’s our problem. We have sworn to come and help both victim and perpetrator without judgment and without hesitation. We have taken on an ancient burden, one we accept gratefully, voluntarily, and with tremendous humility that we are now and will always be our brother’s keeper.

We have dedicated ourselves to being the absolute best at mitigating problems that most people find insurmountable, whether those problems were created by the dynamic nature of uncontrolled fire or the result of our highly technical way of life having a normal failure that was undetected in the system until its interactions climaxed in catastrophic results. We drill and train diligently to uphold our heritage, combining the virtues of the heroic citizen with those of the unselfish warrior, becoming in the end the devoted national servant.