A guy running a local chapter reached out to me because of a comment I left on a YouTube video. We’re collaborating on how to organize more people and push the city council to take aggressive measures like zoning reform, repealing parking minimums, robust public transit, comfortable bike lanes, etc.
It’s definitely to do with work conditions. I’ve been a paramedic for fifteen years, and suffice it to say, I’ve seen (and smelled and heard) some shit. I’ve always felt that I had a harder time processing the stuff from when I worked in a busy metro system and we had to go from coding a kid who drowned just fifteen feet from a party full of adults to holding grandma’s hand and making her warm and comfy on our five minute jaunt to dialysis to “hey, there’s a car on fire and bystanders report hearing screaming from the vehicle”. I would regularly get three hours of sleep over a 72 hour period and have almost no time to process the horrible shit we saw while still having to be a functioning, caring professional for every patient along the way. The also horrible shit we saw in the slower rural area I worked in has haunted me a lot less. There’s probably more to the whole picture than that, but I’m confident that work conditions are a huge factor.