World Fire Prevention Day

I always find World Suicide Prevention Day/Week/Month to be a strange concept. In fact, I find any day dedicated to a specific cause sort of counterproductive.

The reason being that assigning a single day or week to such an issue suggests that we need only think about said issue for that one day. We can shout about and raise awareness for the day. And then we can go back to ignoring the issue for the remaining 364 days. It doesn’t make much sense.

Imagine if the entire planet was on fire (Which it sort of is). Imagine that instead of trying to put out these fires every single day until there wasn’t a flame left, we instead dedicated one day a year to fire extinguishing.

For that one day it would look as if the fire is losing. That there will be no more unbearable, cruel flames. But then, as soon as the day is over, we all stop trying to put out the flames. For the rest of the year the planet is on fire. For the rest of the year we don’t bother to try and extinguish the problem because we put in the effort on World Fire Prevention Day. It wouldn’t make much sense, would it?

And this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have days dedicated to key issues. We should. But this isn’t where our effort should end. Why can’t we talk about suicide prevention every day? There’s nothing stopping us from doing so – so why don’t we?

We could, if we wanted, make every day suicide prevention day until enough work was done that a day is no longer needed.

Instead of dedicating a single day to putting out fires, we could put out fires each and every day until there are no more fires. We could work relentlessly until the work was done.

Because if we only try to dampen the flames for a single day, they will continue to come back. And we will always find ourselves surrounded by fire.