I've blogged in the past about the attitude the pols have toward public safety, especially EMS, since most of the "consumers" aren't big on donating, voting, or having the same skin color. It goes back to Pete Flaherty's calling Pittsburgh EMS a "non-essential service." (You want a laugh -- go back and read all the nice eulogies said about what a friend Flaherty was to EMS complete male bovine metabolic wate product. It's a pity Dr. Nancy Caroline wasn't alive to say her piece.) It's why Caliguri's forced an EMS strike (and I don't care what I said on TV, we caved after a few of the medics broke the picket line). For one brief segment of time, there were enough powerful African-Americans on City Council that an affirmative action EMS class was put together. That was a fascinating program, demonstrating pretty much every point both for and against affirmative action. That affirmative action program aggravated the sexual, sexual orientation and racial harassment of my crew to the point that it resulted in a nasty human rights case and cost me my job because I wouldn't cooperate with the harassment or turn a blind eye. No one cared. Eventually, I gave up blogging about it, mostly. It did come up recently in the proposal to merge Fire and EMS, and every time the City suggests privatizing EMS -- why not privatize the police, too? --, but no one cares and my blogging about it doesn't do ****. Actually, I've come to realize blogging about anything doesn't do anything -- go read the recent discussion about global warming on that one post. I guess that's why I blog a lot less and have been putting up more pretty pictures. Pretty pictures don't carry any delusions of importance or effectiveness. I should have blogged about Cmdr. Gwen Elliot. That, I regret. She wasn't the perfect little wind-up doll all the self-serving eulogies made her out to be. Ah well....