On Thursday, August 5, at the FDIC International 2021 Opening Ceremony Day 2, FDIC Education Director Bobby Halton spoke on “Courage, Truth, and Virtue”:
“The world needs heroes. We all need heroes. A friend of mine once said that firefighters don’t need to be Superman. He was partly wrong. Sometimes we do need to be Superman or Superwoman or, more correctly, we need to be that archetype, that perfect model of what a firefighter represents to the world.
“As firefighters, we were taught early on that there are basically six core values which are indisputably essential to being a firefighter: Commitment, Courage, Discipline, Respect for others, Integrity, and Loyalty. In order to have the ability to live up to any one of those values, there is one value that is indispensable. There is one upon which all the others depend: Courage.
“Aristotle said, ‘Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.’
“This morning, for our purposes, we can think of courage in two settings–physical courage, which is also often called bravery, and moral courage, which is sometimes defined as character. As firefighters, we routinely show tremendous physical courage. It is unquestionably a fundamental reality of our day-to-day work. We do not fear fighting fire, we do not fear taking risks physically.
“As firefighters, we are brave, courageous. When we are fighting fire, we know the risks, we know the dangers, but we are not fearful of them. They are deadly but they are not evil.
“Moral courage is when one is willing to risk the threat of evil imposed upon them by others for expressing the truth, or opposing an orthodoxy, a set of beliefs by which they cannot abide. Moral courage can also be when one refuses to deny that which one holds as truth. Moral courage in that case would be when one refuses to lie to avoid punishment. Moral courage involves taking a risk and surviving physically but perhaps not socially, politically, or financially. Moral courage involves being able to take a stand albeit unpopular or one that contradicts those with power.
“Superman’s tagline is interesting regarding moral courage. The archetype of Superman stood for truth, justice, and the American way.
“We have all experienced seeing things that others are doing that we thought were out of place or even wrong but later turned out to be right or true. Think of Andy Fredericks when he started saying. It was heresy and they would not stand for it. But now we know Andy was right. Everyone does. Flowing water on smoke or not flowing water on smoke was subjective and context dependent. Now we get it, gas cooling all of it. But not then. Then it was not mainstream. If we had had Twitter in the ’90s, it would have been a bloodbath. The attacks on Andy would have been epic.
“Within us all is a tremendous capacity for good and a tremendous capacity for evil. The ultimate sign of outstanding character, true character, is to be able to suppress the evil and elevate the good. We would like to think that we are all virtuous, that we are all always on the side of the good, of the right, that we are crusaders for truth, justice, and the American way.
“The public, society, does think its firefighters are crusaders for truth, justice, and the American way. The society that we work for, the American public, expects us to be the moral equivalent of Superman. But the reality is, most folks are not crusaders. They just want to be left alone.
“It is so bloody amazing how all of us can be intimidated by some of the most desperately unhappy people with absolutely miserable personal lives and usually zero street cred as firefighters just because of the garbage they can generate on social media. And so we comply, or w