No pay, No Spray

[Edh63]

Originally Posted by Ricshoe

Yes, it is debatable. I'm all for doing the right thing, but where do you draw the line? We've had so much legislation forced upon our population over the last 80+ years meant to "do the right thing" that it's turned a significant portion of the population into a bunch of whiners with their hands permanently stuck out waiting for someone else to do something for them or hand them something. They've completely lost (or probably never had it to begin with) all sense of personal responsibility, and feel they are "owed" by others. Sorry, but I don't subscribe to that kind of thinking.

In hindsight, the fire department probably should have had some sort of contingency in place to deal with this sort of situation. They could have had a contract already drawn-up that a "victim" could sign, promising to pay the FD (pick a number, but $5K sounds reasonable) for coming to his rescue. Unfortunately, without something in writing like that, even if the guy verbally agreed to pay, you know darn-well that he'd get a lawyer to fight it after the fact on the grounds that it "wasn't fair" or some other irresponsible claim.

Sometimes in life, you need to fail HARD in order to learn a bigger/greater lesson. Unfortunately, the mindset today is to do whatever you possibly can to prevent someone from failing, whether it's not keeping score in pee wee soccer games or giving banks billions of dollars to bail them out of their own recklessness. This has only resulted in the complete disregard for personal responsibility.

Sorry, I'm now stepping down from my soapbox.

You've obviously missed the point. It's not about teaching someone a lesson the hard way, rather simply acting in a situation that requires obvious intervention. It's the same as the poster mentioned above about an off duty police officer seeing someone getting robbed and making the decision to turn the other way because he's not in uniform or not on his beat at that moment. If it were you being robbed and the officer decided to let you get the shit kicked out of you, would you be preaching "lessons learned"? If you truly believe what you're preaching right now, then you, my friend, need a "lesson" in your life. God forbid you learn it the way you see it.

There are men and women dying for you and I in the Middle East doing the right thing simply because they volunteered to do it. Are you saying that they should just drop their weapons and let shit happen so we can learn some lesson that you think we should learn?

You see, it's mindsets like yours that set poor examples for others when you could easily just act in the moment and show compassion. Who the hell cares about lessons learned when we have the opportunity to help someone in need? The first thing is to help. We can always be litigious afterward. If in fact your first interest is to teach someone a lesson before showing compassion, as in this situation, then you have failed yourself. Just do what you know needs to be done to help someone. This has nothing to do about some free handout. It is just about acting in the moment. I would not want you on the wall guarding my best interest in the night, my friend.