RELATIONSHIPS FORMED on the Internet are peculiar things, but in the 14 months or so since our first e-mail exchange, I’ve come to think of Lt. Michael Morse of the Providence Fire Department as a friend. At least, friendship was the emotional context with which I approached his book Rescuing Providence, and in the spirit of having pride in one’s friends, I’d venture the summary that the most applicable adjective for Michael is “admirable.”

That quality comes across repeatedly throughout his story of life as an EMT — in the work that he does, in his family life, in his treatment of others, in his desire to think well of them. To see Providence through his eyes is to see it in the light of hope, despite all of the manipulation and violence and dishonesty. Perhaps it’s the tacit responsibility required of a person who might on any particular day be the last thing that a fellow human being sees “before leaving this earth forever.”

In his book, participants in and facilitators of gang violence aren’t a bestial blight but people behaving stupidly. The wounded don’t get lectures, but help, although they don’t get absolution if they are partly to blame. The mentally ill aren’t freakish creatures but neither are they inculpable victims to be infantilized. Drunks are a continual annoyance, but ultimately the tragedy is of smudged biographies, not of selfish incommoding.

We’re all just men, women and children trying to get along, some succeeding more than others, and I’m humbled to realize that, by the stick with which Lieutenant Morse may be measured, I’d appear a small man, indeed.

Therein lies the difficulty, because no matter what my emotions lead me to prefer, I’ve concluded that public-sector unionization is among the villains in Rhode Island, and here is a hero, himself merely a representative of many heroes, who stands before the practice in its defense. There can be little doubt that our state is a better place for the involvement of men and women who devote their lives to its service, but that boon is only marginally applicable to the question of whether our Rhode Island needs, for example, to be first in the nation in fire-protection expenditures.

What’s more, I believe Michael agrees with this sentiment in the broader picture. When Carroll Andrew Morse (no relation) asked him, in a Feb. 7 interview on AnchorRising.com, whether he comes away from his daily experience with the variegated cuts of Providence society optimistic or with the sense of “isolated societies all trying to occupy the same space,” Michael expressed doubts. “There are different worlds out there, and nobody makes an attempt to understand the world other than their own,” he says, explaining the attitude as: “You are a chump if you aren’t getting yours.”

Ever since the budget crisis finally broke through the walls of public denial, the news in The Journal has sometimes given the impression of a serialized sob story. Every dollar in the state budget is, apparently, a matter of life and death to somebody.

Still, Lieutenant Morse has “seen the blank stares on people’s faces” when he’s turned up his portable radio during their complimentary, system-abusing rides in the ambulance so that they could listen as their neighbors languished in true emergencies. “They just don’t care.”

Here we have the fatal flaws of any effort to build a government that cares: It has limited defenses against beneficiaries who don’t. Its embracing arms become protective of budgets. And in training recipients how to “get theirs,” it collects stories and images that make it emotionally difficult to resist giving away somebody else’s.

There are people whom life has mauled. There are people for whom public assistance proves to be less a handout than a loan — and a spectacular investment, at that. Even sympathetic figures and records of success, however, aren’t immunizations from fiscal reality. There are reasons that any given family only donates so much to charity — and only gives so much to its own members. The fact that our communal family encompasses the entire state does not negate those reasons.

Neither do our relationships with public sector union members erase the reality that unions are, by their nature, entities designed to help members “get theirs.” In that effort, their visible representatives stand shoulder to shoulder with the other miners of government revenue, and in this state — small enough to grasp — they have become intrinsic to the suffocating grip of inept governance.

It may amount to asking for concessions from the conscientious, but Rhode Islanders need their heroes to assist in the rescue of our state from the insidious mentality that, in our compassion and (yes) our admiration, we have too long allowed to smolder. Otherwise, family and friends, all, will find themselves scathed.

Justin Katz, an occasional contributor, runs AnchorRising.com, a public-policy discussion Web site.