Communities will have to stop getting the milk for free, the cow is dried up. Time to Anni up and be responsible for their citizens.
Again very.... very rural areas will have to continue upon volunteer EMS. That itself is a different situation.
R/r 911
First off.. it's ante up not anni up (My name is Annie so I'm sensitive, and yes, Annie IS okay)
Since when is 8,000 population considered rural? We're talking about communities of 1000 or less.
And to address your comment about will those of us who volunteer with EMS do meal on wheels, clean streets etc. The answer there is yes. I do a street cleanup twice a year for my adopted area of road, I also have volunteered countless hours with homeless kids, tutoring in schools, sewing costumes for the local high school and college drama department. Coached soccer teams, gave blood, doorbelled for the Cancer Society, and teach first aid and CPR at a local homeless shelter for those who need the cards for potential jobs.
In really rural areas, we understand that its us or nothing. We rely on each other in so many ways, and we know each other. There is no anonymity in a rural area. Your neighbor's pain affects you personally.
There is also no expectation that the government will provide. There is no expectation that the school will keep going. There is no local food bank, but there is an exchange of garden produce from those who's gardens are extra generous. There is no thrift store, but there is a hand-me-down network of outgrown kids clothes that makes goodwill seem understocked. There is no local nursing home, but there are neighbors who will come over and sit with your elderly mom for you while you run to the store. When someone is terminally ill, the network of meal support, fill in for hospice and neighbors signing up to do everything from walk your dog, to change the pt's diapers is generally longer than the people you need. The school has more parents in the classroom than paid staff. The coaches, art teachers, music teachers, are unpaid parents. Office staff is 50% volunteers.
I do what I do for my community. Not for myself, not for glory or the measily $7 per call that I get. I do it because the community is willing to pay to train me, and the community gets the benefit of that training. Now, will this tiny community of under 1000 people ever have a full time staffed EMS agency, probably not. Will we have a hospital, doctors clinic or bank? Nope! We don't even have a post office, just a collection of post office boxes in the corner of the general store.
People who whine because their care isn't the best, ambulance takes to long to show up, takes them to the wrong facility, or doesn't care enough, don't get a lot of pity from me. Sounds like a case of too-high expectations. People die. It happens to all of us.
In the meantime, a segment of society is going on, taking care of themselves, relying on their neighbors and working together to make a real community. I can't see this as a bad thing. I wouldn't trade being able to get 20 people together to repaint a widow's house for having a faster response from ALS. I wouldn't trade knowing the names of almost every kid I see at the local blackberry festival for having a higher level of Trauma center. I prefer living in a community where we take care of each other, with our own time than one where we work 60 hours a week to be able to pay a stranger to do this for us. What happened to self reliance?
