Burning fire truck? It’s not in the west, it’s in a state known for cool temperatures.
The fire truck is on fire. It’s totaled.
Not even good for scrap now.
You’d think this would be in the middle of all
that’s burning on the West Coast but it isn’t. It’s in a state known for cool
temperatures and usually, cool heads. But it’s a symbol of our times.
It brings together a few big ideas: Climate
change which wasn’t the cause here, but it’s a big contributor to fires in the
west, in Brazil’s Amazon, in Greece. And it is a picture of the vehicle that is
supposed to save lives, not self-consume.
The truck is symbolic. The real truck is
in Washington DC and in your state capital and maybe in your city hall.
It doesn’t have wheels, it has feet. It doesn’t have an engine; it does
have brains. They don’t work. Sometimes, they don’t work by design.
The people whose job it is to protect us are not
protecting us. The people whose job it is to plan for our survival?
They pulled the plug.
The “president,” tells Bob Woodward, didn’t want
us to panic so he minimized all he knew about COVID19. Because of this, we
panicked. He wanted to wish it away. The mermaid, the genie and all the
other dispensers of wish fulfillment were nowhere to be found. The genie stayed
in the bottle. The mermaid couldn’t swim to shore. She was blinded by an oil
spill and had insufficient tail power to swim through all the plastic waste.
Also on fire: the Constitution. While your
congressman was attending a 2nd Amendment rally, your senators were deadlocked
over some obscure point of law and sitting on their hands. Your Supreme
Court justices were waiting for the best among them to die. The fire truck
turned to ashes.
We need new equipment. American LaFrance
(1873-2014) is gone. Someone please put “fire truck” into a search block and
click on “shopping.”
You know who to vote against.
NOTES FROM ALL OVER:
(SUMMERVILLE SC) -- Do you want to know what
happened to the American LaFrance factory? First, the original owners sold out
to a private equity fund. The fund then sold the plant to Daimler. Daimler
eventually used it to produce the Dodge Sprinter, a passenger and cargo van.
They stopped production in 2009.
TODAY’S QUOTE: “Please put the shower curtain inside the
tub.” -- attributed to Conrad Hilton when asked what he’d like to tell all the
guests at his hotels.
Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2020
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