My dear friends,
After long and careful thought I have had to take a step which will perhaps be most disturbing to many of you, though to others it may come as no surprise. I can no longer remain working for the City of South Bend nor in the fire service as a patterning way of life. Because it does.
The routine of 6-7 college classes per semester and its ever-increasing demands (20+ hours per week) has clearly met an impasse with the demands of the fire department and its ever-efficient mechanisms that move people (to the tune of 60-80 hours per week). I am in all these places and everyone comes up short on what they expect of me. And me too. You can own 10 houses but only reside in one at a time.
And in that way I find myself – often chaotically - living in many worlds at once; and mastering the Tesseract to slip dimensions and mess with time hasn’t yet found its way into my brain in this life. And my attempt at doing so with some kind of firefighter math has for some time been taking a toll on my health, my stress level, my relationships with family and friends, and my ability to perform work and tasks efficiently. And that realization has been the biggest blessing to date.
Every time I succeed, every time I find a workaround that takes a little more time away from me to “get the job done,” I become evermore unawares of the ways by which the mechanisms that move people here pattern into my daily life. And in that way, the same psychological achievements of the early 20th Century have been co-opted in the 21st and implemented into our workforces to get more out of us (all of us… ALL of us), all at the cost of the human being doing the work, whatever that looks like for the individual. For me, I do the work and I don’t quit until my body does. It makes a good firefighter, but not often a good Chad. And when I’m somewhere else all the time, not a good friend, dad, or husband either (at the cost of one marriage).
Put another way, the longer I stay, the more ignorant I become to my own patterning behaviors. And the better defenses I build around them, too. The eye cannot see itself. In the 2006 film Rocky Balboa, Stallone’s iconic character says to his adult son about a job he is conflicted about, “Son, if you stay in one place long enough, you become that place.” I believe he was right.
I have hesitated to add this, for we all get our chance to see how the sausage is made. I was assuaged to go forward by an impromptu conversation with a 79-year-old woman I picked up a couple of times on the ambulance. My wife and I saw her when we were shopping. I shared some information about chickens from having raised them now for several years when she mentioned how flimsy the eggs were (a consequence of big business’s relationship with farm animals). I then apologized for offering information that she didn’t ask for. She was quick to tell me that it was helpful and needed given her tight budget and real-life problems. The ones so many people are facing as fewer and fewer remain insulated. So here it is…
As long as the architectural framework remains that forces its employees to be at war with themselves and with one another, there will be no peace. Same story new faces. So long as policies remain that are authoritarian and one-sided by their structure, the results will remain the same. Good people carry out work that secretly contributes to the destruction of the heart. Work that is wrought with doublebinds that put one’s humanity against another’s and relies upon discipline matrixes and Lexipol policy mandates to mechanize what these administrators are being asked to do. The banality of evil. Institutionalized inbreeding. It goes by many names.
And it is not like they don’t fight for us, because they do. And yet they have a job to do, and if you remove enough humanity from the work with pneumonic jargon, euphemisms, and soft language, and you look at it simply from an algorithmic perspective; the more efficient the administration gets at its job comes at the consequence of the of the union and labor side’s ability to do theirs. Not the way the individual people intended it, but the way the structure is laid out. And this always pits friends against friends in unresolved tension, left only with their assumptions And this goes both ways, does it not?
And to continue in this pursuit expecting the mechanisms to change before they change the people I care about and myself as well… is something I can no longer abide; for my engagement with it has always left me doublebound, the best option still leaving some in disarray. Triage by another name… In my experience, it has been murder on the heart. I have had my share to appreciate the contrast and to know for me and me alone (for we each find our own way) what I must do with my remaining days. And in that way the bureaucracy never changes, only our engagement with it.
The fire department will always be there. It was there before me. It will remain after. I, like each of us, will eventually be a footnote to a footnote. And in that way I will not change a thing lest perspective of another through the ripples I leave, and when I leave. Those which flow out and into the people I love through our time together. If there is an opus magnum I could put my name behind during my time at the fire department, I think it would be the assimilation of something like that.
And this: When I was with you, each of you, I hope I was truly with you. This may not always have been the case, because someone always has a “this one time” story. You know, those ones when we saved face to protect our own ego? Which makes us all the same in that way, doesn’t it? And if a conversation we had together moved you in the way so many of them have moved me, then I suppose that makes us the same in that way too.
It was always the people who were real with me that I have been drawn toward. And for every time that you were there, or for every time you shared something personal with me, I cannot begin to thank you enough. Every time we laughed in the firehouse. Every time we cried together. Every time we shared stories about loved ones with debilitating medical conditions, the ones that eventually took their lives. Their stories and their lives remain through new variables; their husbands, wives, children, and friends. Us. You. Me. Just as ours will when we are gone. Our stories are not for other people to tell with wanton disregard. They are for us to share and gift to one another in acts of trust and goodwill.
And in that way, anything good I have said or done has been a result of that winnowing of my own assumptions and inhibitions, and their examples have come from my environment and where I found myself in the middle of, or rather on the receiving end of those ripples that moved me in so-often turbulent water.
And there’s something that exists, perhaps between the comedy and the tragedy of it all. Beauty. I had to be here for any of this to have happened, full stop. And there’s no other way it could have been, either. There is beauty in that. And peace, that which I can walk away with having left so many pieces of me over the years, in our conversations and perhaps - not so endearingly - on the floors and shelves of the firehouses, ambulances, and firetrucks.
One more thing I think which truly binds us: we all need to figure out a way to talk about the stuff that happens here; how the sausage is made, as it were. Our experiences as we experienced them. As firefighters, we see an iteration of reality that for some people is very uncomfortable to look at; dismantling even, as we see when we go on calls. But was it the information or how it was delivered?
Stories are supposed to be meant to convey important information first. It is then by this measure that entertainment is a byproduct of the orator’s ability to convey the information in a way that hits them personally. And so many people in the world are so far divorced from that reality that it can be hard for them to relate to us. And the same is true for us when we are with them, isn’t it? We have to live in that world too. It is up to each of us to take the time and flesh apart those experiences. To consider the meaning we have associated to them. And to share that with the people kind enough to share their remaining days with ours, for however long that slice of reality is. That’s the space I am taking up now.
I think the most glaring problem in our fire department - and in scale - our society is the hard and fast divisions we make with people we do not agree with, whatever that looks like. Put in other words, the refusal to see the perspective of another. It is a cancer that grows at the cost of its host. We are eating ourselves alive, my friends. And it doesn’t have to be that way.
Doing this work was good for a time – real good – and now it is time that I do something different. And stop being somewhere else all the time. I don’t know what the future will look like, but I didn’t know had I stayed here, either. I do know I’m going to take some of this extra time I’m about to have and slow down. Perhaps more of the context will fill in that way.
My wife and I spent some time in Thailand in November. The people there echoed a sentiment in every example I can recount (and they weren't all pleasant): Friendship first. I believe they believed this extends to the land beneath us and the air above us. By the nature of us being visitors in their country and seeing the international interactions, I can see this translates cross-culturally. It is an endearing and irreversible lesson and one I will commit my remaining days to in some capacity.
I’ll see you there. We’re all talking to ourselves, my friends. It’s like that Carsie Blanton song, “Be good to the people you love, love everybody alive.”
I love you all as I have known you, right where you needed to be. Salud, and good luck.
Faithfully and Fraternally Yours,
Chad Alan Bartalone
2023, May 1
Good luck man, I hope everything works out for you
Wow. Quite possibly the best “I quit” letter that I’ve ever read. And I’ve read some doozies. I’ve written a few of my own, too, that as a former English Major, I felt were of rather high caliber. But this- this is something special. You’re resignation is not only from a job but a resignation to move forward in the context of your own truth as it continues to evolve and reveal itself to you. Thanks for sharing this. This decision is sure to find you and those you love much happier for it. Thanks for your years of sweat and sacrifice. I’m excited you will soon be serving the world in a different way. 🙏🙂 All the very best to you. -TMW-