As Firehouse Sees It: Build Others Up, Not Beat Them Down

Firehouse humor and banter are some of the best ways for you to show how much you care about your brothers and sisters and to help to battle the stress of the daily grind in the fire service. I spent equal time making wise cracks as I did training, working with others and preparing equipment for another call. That was all before social media, and for that I am thankful.

The plague of negativity from the ever-growing world of social media is getting worse daily, and I’m not just referring to politics and the other divides that we have seen over the past few years. It has gotten into firehouses, where members don’t talk to each other but opt to message each other from different rooms in the station.

Don’t get me wrong, social media plays a great role in building more prepared and tactically diverse firefighters via just a few finger movements on the phone. Now, with Facebook, Citizen App and a host of live-streaming platforms, you can watch incidents unfold in front of your eyes. That’s a great tool for having discussions among those who are on your crew. Remember, though, that what you’re seeing is only a view of a building, often without the full context or radio traffic to help to understand what’s going on. When you drop jabs on firefighters about how they operate, what does that say about you, your department and the effect on the public’s trust in their department?

Furthermore, there seems to be more time that’s spent creating pages and groups that pick apart others. Once called Monday morning quarterbacking, critiquing incidents now follows the NFL’s growth to multiple nights of televised games, wherein there’s a constant barrage of firefighters (and those who play firefighter on social media) bashing and beating up others over their choice of helmet, apparatus, response policy, tactics, apparatus placement, and on and on.

At a dinner earlier this year, we discussed social media, and I was shocked to learn of the number of groups that are dedicated to bashing the brothers and sisters. I’ve seen them shared, and they seem to have no purpose but to put people down. The groups go way beyond the debate on European helmets, nozzle selection, fire knock down from the exterior and options for powering vehicles.

How can people publicly post—and if you click through to their profile, you usually can figure out their name and the department that they represent—to share negative messages yet not send some constructive feedback? That feedback can open eyes to another way of doing things that those who originally posted might not be aware of. Step up and do the right thing: Use social media to help others.

I will be the first to admit that I took to the keyboard to make some digs in the past. There is one series of threads I was involved with where I continue to hang my head in shame and embarrassment over the words that I put into the online forum. Even though there was a sense of anonymity, some people knew that I weighed in, and it reflected poorly on who I was and my career. I apologize to the people who were involved and thank those who had the keen sense to tell me to end it. With hindsight, it was a jackass move that certainly didn’t do any good for anyone. Although it created some laughs, the real outcome was negative recourse for a few people, and the laughs weren’t worth it. Not at all.

When you look at what’s going on in the country at this point, the collective positive actions of the 1 million-plus firefighters could advance the fire service’s skills, reputation, and knowledge by leaps and bounds. Instead, there’s confusion and misinformation being spread.

There’s nothing like a good laugh to make the day better, but posting a photograph of a firefighter wearing or using a new piece of equipment, or maybe not wearing all the PPE, doesn’t help.

Instead of beating them down, be positive and helpful, or don’t post at all. As Chief Alan Brunacini said, “Be nice.”