My Christmas Message to You: Stop Being a Prisoner

Dec. 25, 2014
Are we going to settle for the fire department we want or labor mightily to achieve the department the community we service deserves.

Once again we have come to that joyous time of the year when we as people pause to remember the birth of our Lord and Savior. This year I have decided to send out a tough holiday message to all of you. I am tired of hearing and reading of people who continually whine about not getting or having all that they want and need. Suck it up gang. Who had it tougher than Mary and Joseph when they arrived in Bethlehem on that long ago night?

I do not think that Joseph was able to go online and book his room through a handy-dandy website. Further, Mary was not able to carry much in the way of luggage on that poor donkey upon which she was forced to ride. Heck, they could not even get a real room, because there were none to be had at the Inn. It was only through the generosity of the innkeeper that they were able to bed down on the hay with the animals. Even the baby Jesus had to sleep in rags which the Bible generously calls “swaddling clothes.” 

My friends, it is my suggestion to you that Mary and Joseph were prisoners. No, not in the literal sense of being confined to a jail or anything like that.  No, they were prisoners of their social class.  They were prisoners of their status within that ancient society. They were prisoners of a government which forced them to make a mandatory trip to Bethlehem. In essence they were prisoners of the society wherein the lived.

So too is it with you and I my friends. Whether we know it or not, we are prisoners in ways which most of us cannot really comprehend. While it is a matter of our contextual orientation, I contend that it is also a fact. Sadly it is the nature of these prisons which limits our ability to overcome the problems of the past and move into in bright, shining, and safer new world.  Please let me make a few suggestions for you to consider.

Are you a prisoner of any of the following? How about taking some time to review this list: 

  • A prisoner of the past
  • A prisoner of the present
  • A prisoner of the future
  • A prisoner of fear
  • A prisoner of hate
  • A prisoner of doubt
  • A prisoner of technology
  • A prisoner of one of society’s many wars
  • A prisoner of one way of fighting fires
  • A prisoner of the way you were taught to lead
  • A prisoner of tradition

Please be honest here. No one can ever hope to initiate change until they admit that they have a problem. Each of these things listed above is a serious problem. Face facts; these are the things which our fire service face every time it seeks to make any sort of change. These are the bars behind which our fire service lives its day-to-day life as prisoners. However, like any other journey which we will ever undertake in life, we must find our starting point before we can move out toward the future. It is our prison cell which will serve as our point of departure. 

A number of these concepts can easily be tied together. Many people equate the traditions of their fire department with the supposed joy of the “good old days.” These two can come together to make a person a hide-bound prisoner of the past. Here is where the comfort of the past leads many to develop a fear of any sort of change. Can you see how easily being a prisoner of the past can morph into making a person a prisoner of the present?

I have long taught that each day of the future is tied directly to a comfortable day in the present which is in turn tied to that comfortable past. Here is where any movement towards change can create a real problem for the culture of your organization. As one man who has fought the forces of complacency for many decades, I am here to tell you how difficult it is to advocate for change. You had best be ready to get your chops busted.  However, I have believed in many things and have worked hard to make them happen.  In the long haul I believe the effort and the pain to have been worth it.

You might ask how it is that I can say a person might become a prisoner of the future, because the future has yet to happen. True enough, but let me suggest that these are the people who become caught up in creating change just for the sake of change. They are so intent on changing things that they will tell you that since the past was so bad that we cannot make any reference to it in how we work to change our organizations. 

These people can create unforeseen problems when they take it upon themselves to run off all of the older troops who are in any way tied to the past.  They fear the influence of these people on their plans for change.  Sadly what they fail to recognize is that in running off the people they are also running off all of the knowledge that these people have accumulated from their decades of service. 

This is not just a fire service attitude. I have seen it in fraternal organizations, I have seen it in the business world and, sadly, I have seen it in religious communities.  In each and every one of these instances the organization was diminished by the lack of knowledge which occurred when the older members were driven off by the new forces of organizational leadership and change. 

These change agents who have seemed in many instances to have run a muck are also heavily tied in to the latest technology.  These are the people who prefer to run their organizations by texts and emails rather than through the mechanism of human interaction.  Yes I use emails and yes I use text messages.  However, I still prefer to call people on the phone or shared my thoughts directly through face-to-face interactions.  Being a prisoner of emails can get you into all sorts of bad situations.  Emails or messages will never be able to portray the inflection of a person’s voice.  That my friends is a tremendous part of the communications interaction.

It is hard to say whether these prisoners of technology fear people, hate people or whether simply doubt their own abilities.  Regardless of the reason, people like this are setting themselves and their organization up for an-ever accelerating pattern of confusion and failure.

Let me suggest that if you are to succeed in breaking the bonds of any of the prisoner things above it is critical for you not to confuse a happy memory with the right way of doing things. My wife has long criticized me for speaking of how good things were in the past.  She is continually telling me to stop looking at things through the ‘rose-colored glasses’ of life. This is particularly true of my nearly three years spent overseas during the Vietnam War. 

Actually, that is how our minds work; or at least how mine works.  The bad things go to the back of our brains.  They are crowded out by the good things. I guess my firefighting heritage is a good example of this.  In Newark we prided ourselves on being a tough, old-school interior firefighting operation.  While the memories are great when the guys and I get together to spin tales of yesteryear, perhaps the reality was that we were exposed to a great deal of unnecessary danger. 

Let me suggest that this is one of the hardest parts of breaking the prison bonds.  Our pride gets in the way of our common sense.  Perhaps that is why I am and have long been such an advocate of the research which has been undertaken over the past few years.  It has shown that a great deal of what I was taught was correct after all.  However, it has also shown that the environment within which we now may be upon to operate has changed a great deal.  It has provided us with a new range of options which we must add to our operational tool boxes.  We need to train on all of these tools, both new and old.  You need to be able to assess what is going on around you and then reach into your toolbox in order to come up with the right tool for the situation at hand. 

The hard part of this equation is going to require each of use to make the following decision.  Are we going to settle for the fire department we want or are we going to labor mightily to achieve the fire department we actually need and that the community we service deserves.  That is why I have decided to offer you a vision of the fire service that is created by people who have decided that they no longer wish to be prisoners within their own world.  We need our fire service to be a product of people who make their decisions freely and openly.

My friends, please take the time to enjoy the holiday season.  Like you I stand ready to roll out with my volunteer fire department during the upcoming days.  And as Sergeant Phil Esterhouse used to say each day at roll call on the old Hill Street Blues show, “…Hey, let’s be careful out there.”  Merry Christmas to you all.  

HARRY R. CARTER, Ph.D., CFO, MIFireE, a Firehouse.com Contributing Editor, is a municipal fire protection consultant based in Adelphia, NJ. Dr. Carter retired from the Newark, NJ, Fire Department and is a past chief and active life member of the Adelphia Fire Company. Follow Harry on his "A View From my Front Porch" blog. You can reach Harry by e-mail at [email protected]. 

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