I read a lot of firefighter news. I have Google Alerts set up to show up in my inbox every morning. I also follow a lot of fire news linkers on twitter. I don’t read everything. But I do when I see a headline like this: Firefighter, Son Due in Court Wednesday. And on that page is a video titled, “Firefighter and Son Charged with Murder.”
He’s innocent until proven guilty (you know, despite the presence of eye-witnesses, ahem), of course, so I won’t be commenting on the case. What I do want to ask is this: what is his son’s career? Really, I need to know what his son does for a living.
Because we obviously had to know that the man-beating father with poor parenting skills was a firefighter. So, I want to know what the son does. Is he a CPA at his wits end at the end of tax season? A glee club teacher gone crazy after too many rehearsals for sectionals? A freelance writer who had been holed up working on a piece for too long? Was he a train conductor, a construction worker, a member of a band? Did he teach small children right from wrong in our school system? Did he fix my computer after hackers wrecked all of my data? Would he have come to fix my pipes after my kids threw something in the toilet that clogged everything up? Those occupations might be mentioned in the article at some point but would make an unlikely headline.
I get it. Firefighters, like police officers and soldiers, are held to a higher standard. They are here to serve and protect. When they go rogue and beat someone to death or start fires or any other number of heinous crimes, it’s kind of scary. These are the people we expect to save us. These are the people we count on when something bad is happening in our own lives. And so, when I hear a story about some firefighter who has gone off the deep end and started his own unintentional or, if the crime is premeditated, intentional smear campaign of firefighters everywhere, I want to create my own headline that reads: Freelance Writer, Full-Time Blogger and Part-Time Newspaper Photographer Goes Bat Poop Crazy and Hits Really Stupid (Alleged) Crime-Committing Soon-to-be-EX-Firefighter Over the Head with Her Really Heavy Purse-slash-Camera Bag. Except I’m able to keep my anger in check.
But that makes my other point, doesn’t it? If I beat someone up alongside the road, they’d most likely use my title of mom to make titillating headlines. Unless I was at, say, the BlogHer conference. Then I might get some reference to my work, though it would be something like, “CRAZY BLOGGING WOMAN KILLS EQUALLY STRANGE PEERS.” If my husband delivers the beatdown, well, screw his role of husband and father, it’s a firefighter! There are so many job titles that would never have made that headline, let alone the small article itself. I really want to see more occupational titles in headlines though. So I’m sure to avoid every person in any profession. Because the bad seeds should be able to speak for us all.
All of this is to say that my heart goes out to Mark Wallace’s family, the man who was beaten to his death by this unfortunate so-called firefighter and his apparently jobless son. I am so very sorry for your loss and that it came at the hands of someone who was supposed to protect.
