"And you can take that to the bank."
Posted on 07/06/2012 3:04:20 PM PDT by RoadTest
For just as politics can save the culture, politics can also destroy it.
Which brings me to Thomas Lopez, a 21-year old lifeguard in South Florida.
Two days before the Fourth of July, Lopez was fired for helping rescue a man drowning 1,500 feet outside of his designated zone.
"It was a long run, but someone needed my help. I wasn't going to say no," Lopez told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and other media outlets.
When Lopez filed his incident report, he was canned on the spot.
"They didn't tell me in a bad way. It was more like they were sorry, but rules are rules,'" Lopez said. "I couldn't believe what was happening."
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
We are fast becoming a society that does not value life. In any case I would much rather lose my job that have to live with myself after watching another human being die when it would have been so simple to save his life.
This incident is typical of what can happen when you place bureaucrats in charge of an army. All they know is what’s written on a piece of paper and are unable to think to deviate from those words. This is only one example of what’s taking place in this country and, yes, there is a moral (or immoral) component to this behavior.
A people with established morality can largely self-govern, but there is no limit to the ways that immoral people can think up to 'get around' a law. So more and more laws are made, but the people are always one jump ahead.
Restore morality and the laws will take care of themselves.
"And you can take that to the bank."
Gee, here I thought life guards were supposed to save the drowning ones.
Only in their zone, according to the Vogons.
Ohhhh, it all makes sense now. If you see someone drowning, who is not in your zone, you are supposed to let them drown.
Got it!
They should rename them zone guards instead of life guards.
No, it can't. We keep waiting for politics to save the culture and it never happens. That is because politics, and laws, and culture itself, rest upon a moral foundation.
Damage the moral foundation and the structure that rests on it is doomed. You can't save the structure unless you first restore the underpinnings. You can't win the political fight unless and until you first engage and confront the moral component.
In any case, the boy did right. Whatever job or career you choose, you should always be aware that the day may come that you have to resign if you are required to violate your code of honor. This young man did it without a second thought. This kind of man gives us hope; the men who canned him are the problem and need to be shamed publicly as a lesson to the rest.
The man was offered his job back and he refused...Good for him...
I have some sympathy for the company that employed him.
He was supposed to watch people in his area, and had any of them had difficulties, rescue them. If any of them drowned when he left to save someone else, the resulting lawsuit could have put them out of business.
Jeff Ellis Management LLC, the company, employs between 10-20 people.
Thomas Lopez saved a man outside of his companies’ area. In doing so, if someone in his area drowned, while because it was an LLC, it wouldn’t have totally wiped out the owners, they would have lost their business, and their investment in it. It would have cost them a fortune.
It would have also meant that between 10-20 people would have been fired, in this crappy job market. For the likely older, administrative employees, they would have to go on welfare, because nobody would hire them ever again.
So he would have saved one person, at the expense of the life of another person, and ruined a lot of people.
Should he have saved that other man? Certainly. However, I cannot blame the innocent people he could have harmed in the process for firing him.
In my opinion, it is a corollary of what Adams once said, that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Sad but true. We see now the fruits of that.
I have to disagree with you on this.
The company should have said “We understand. It was a calculated risk by our employee, nobody was hurt and someone was saved, so it all turned out for the best. Thank goodness the person was saved. We teach our employees to use their best judgement and exercise it, and we applaud our lifeguard for doing so. He understands his primary responsibility, and the risk was worth it.”
It was a calculated risk. How many times does a lifeguard have to go into the water in one day to save someone? I will bet the odds are pretty small it would ever be more than one on a given day. I worked on the flight deck of a carrier when I was in the Navy, and I remember being told that even though we might not understand the rationale behind the rules we were expected to follow, those rules were often written in blood, and didn’t need to be re-learned at that cost, so we better keep our training in mind.
But this is a different situation. I think the bigger problem is an overly litigious society, where a jury cannot be trusted to view a situation like this in the correct context, and that saddens me.
So, given the choice between saving a real drowning person, versus saving the life of a potential theoretical person, the life guard could sit secure in his chair, and sleep soundly in his bed, knowing that while a guy drowned down the beach from him while he watched, the theoretical person still lives, theoretically, thanks to his brave decision to do nothing.
In this litigious society, yes, I get it. I would still trust this guy with my life, if my life was on the line. And I already know where I would stand if my life depended upon his bosses. While he's running to save my butt, they'll be on the phone to their attorneys.
Yes and no. As I said, he should have saved the man. However, the company almost *had* to fire him. Their insurer would be very upset with this, and probably jack up their liability premiums, which for a lifeguard company are already probably huge.
A lot of companies used to prohibit their employees from interfering with armed, or even unarmed robbers, because if anything bad happened to anyone, they would take it in the shorts. They figured losing a few hundred to a robber was just cheaper than being sued by the robber’s family, the employees family, half a dozen people claiming whiplash, etc.
And down in Brazil, bus companies figured out that injured people got much higher settlements than dead people, so they ordered their bus drivers that if they hit someone, they should “finish the job”. Several reports of somebody just gently bumped by a bus, without injury, then the bus driver trying to run them down as they ran for cover.
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