Senator Lindsey Graham died Saturday night in his Capitol Hill home after a cardiac arrest. The dispatch audio says the crew got to his front door, and the deadbolt was thrown. Someone had told 911 the front door was unlocked. It wasn’t. Three firefighters stood outside a rowhouse blocks from the United States Capitol and fought a deadbolt while a seventy-one-year-old man was in arrest. More than fifteen minutes passed between arrival and chest compressions. Fifteen goddamn minutes. The dispatch didn’t even have his age right. They were working a “seventy-three-year-old” that didn’t exist. The goddamn system didn’t know who they were trying to save.
You know who has never once called 911 and prayed the door would open? The people who sit in offices three blocks from that house and vote on what this system gets funded for. The ones who cut budgets, declared government can’t do anything right, then drove home to gated communities with private security and concierge medicine on speed dial. They have never once watched a clock tick past the four-minute mark and hoped a stranger would start CPR on their father. They have never had to.
This is what “fiscal responsibility” delivers in practice. A system that took twenty minutes to start compressions on a sitting United States Senator, three blocks from the building where they pass the laws. My cousin in Friendship, Wisconsin — fifty-three, two heart attacks, lives forty-five minutes from the nearest cath lab — he knows exactly what this system delivers to people like him. It delivers a wait. It delivers a prayer. It delivers a funeral.
Cinder is hissing at the dispatch log. The deadbolt in the cartoon is the only color in the panel. The door is the story. The door is always the story.
Fuck the people who broke this. They will never wait for it. They made damn sure of that.
Source story: the source story.