Optimism or Pessimism?

BY BOBBY HALTON

People love pessimism. No matter how good things get, no matter how well things are going, people are always going to enjoy listening to those who preach gloom and doom more than they will those who preach optimism and opportunity. We all like to believe that we are optimistic, that we are focused on improving, that we are convinced that better days are ahead. But that is inconsistent with human nature—human nature as evidenced by tons and tons of newspapers, magazines, and now online stories filled with the disasters to come. We all can remember the great Y2K scare: Every computer in the world would stop functioning, planes would fall from the sky, power plants would explode—it was going to be Armageddon. I think somewhere a Pac-Man machine broke, but other than that everything seemed to go along pretty well.

Today, in the fire service in the United States, we are looking at shrinking budgets and dwindling revenue streams because of our current deep recession and the ramifications of how we fund our career and volunteer organizations. As property values decline and as sales receipts and the taxes from those decline, it follows that our revenue stream from those funding sources for our organizations is directly impacted. It is hard to find an organization that is not struggling to make budget. Does that mean that the fire service is doomed or that we will not be able to continue to advance our profession and to improve our service delivery? Absolutely not. What it does mean is that our service delivery may look different in some instances, that we may need to find new ways to finance those services, and that we are going to have to communicate more effectively and listen more efficiently to the needs and desires of our communities.