Many of you weren’t even alive when this report hit the stations (maybe even some of your parents weren’t either), but it was a very graphic expose of what we faced.

If I asked you to determine if someone was having an MI by looking at one lead of a cardiac monitor, could you do it?

In emergency services, too many problems are treated alike: we are in the business of responding to disasters. Usually, though, those disasters are not OUR disasters.

Leadership implies that we have something that others don’t have. We can use it for good. Or we can use it to our own advantage. And in that, it requires a choice.

We talk about the “supreme sacrifice” and wear shirts that say, “We fight what you fear.” We tell people that our bond is based on “brotherhood’. These are all words that suggest a higher calling.

I see the failure in my own interface with the situation, and I see the failures in many others who permitted the condtion to occur, knowingly or not.

The point is that true leadership requires sacrifice. Real leaders don’t just mail it in when they are tired, or sick, or having a bad day. They put others first and they continue soldiering on.

I actually used to sneak into the movie theatre that is in the hotel complex downstairs from the convention center.