The Sartell City Council meeting of June 23 was so refreshing because it was not a long ponderance of complicated city issues. Instead it was 30 minutes of warm fuzzies and thank you’s for the good deeds of law-enforcement officers, firefighters, first responders, paramedics, medical clinics and residents.
Nearly 20 people and two businesses received official recognition. Three groups of public servants and residents were honored with “Life Saving Awards” and two local medical clinics were recognized with “Meritorious Service Awards.” Sartell Public Safety Director and Police Chief Brandon Silgjord presented the awards followed by hearty applause from council members and the audience. Silgjord himself received one of the awards, presented by Sartell City Administrator Anna Gruber, for helping save the life of a suicidal man on the edge of a Sartell bridge. (For specific information, see two stories in this newspaper.)
All of the awards were for good deeds valorously undertaken last year: one instance of saving the life of an elderly woman who had collapsed, another of a man who’d suffered a cardiac arrest and the third for encouraging words that convinced the man not to jump off the bridge.
The other two awards, for meritorious service, were presented to two Sartell medical clinics for their outreach partnership wellness and support programs with the city’s police officers, firefighters and first responders.
Silgjord’s comments during the awards ceremony were not only upbeat and heartwarming but also informative. To share just one example, we learned that first responders experience cardiac problems much higher than the general public and that they are highly susceptible to concussions and spinal injuries because of the physical stresses of their work.
The biggest unspoken-but-inherent “lesson” of the awards evening was that all of us tend to take for granted our public servants and the extraordinary risks they are exposed to day after day, night after night. Firefighters, for instance, are subject to the hazards of burning rubbish falling on them, collapsing floors or walls and sudden explosions.
Police officers never know when they might encounter violence, such as when they are called to quell domestic-rage situations in homes or when making traffic stops when someone in the vehicle might react with explosive anger. Just one tragic local example of that is Brian Klinefelter, a St. Joseph police officer shot to death by a robbery suspect whose vehicle was stopped by Klinefelter on Jan. 19, 1996.
Most people never stop to think how police officers save countless lives by stopping drivers who are speeding, intoxicated or distracted.
First responders, too, risk danger to themselves when they arrive at sometimes-volatile emergencies.
Many of the duties of those public servants can be described in one word – heroic.
All too many people sometimes bad-mouth public servants, especially those in law enforcement. They hear and see incidents of “rogue cops” doing awful things (the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis is one example). And those incidents tend to loom large in some people’s minds as they forget or never pause to consider all of the “good cops” who help people and save lives day and night. All of their good works tend to go unnoticed, out of sight, out of mind.
That is why that city council awards ceremony was so refreshing and instructive. It was one big warm-fuzzy reminder of how those deeply dedicated public servants keep us safe from harm and how they save so many lives.
They truly do deserve gratitude and heartfelt thanks for their heroic work.