Episode 12

Look around right now, and there’s sparks flying everywhere, and the country feels like a tinderbox. When you get blasted with a smokescreen of lies, and an arsonist laughs and avoids accountability while something he set ablaze burns, you can’t keep your mind from running to places you never wanted it to go. This mental adventuring to potential consequences for those who caused the chaos has been going on for me for some time, but let’s just focus on a few things that have happened in the past week.

I come from a military family, and when I saw a clip of the big orange blow-hole who sits at the Resolute Desk dismissing the reporter asking about the soldiers who died in Lithuania as if the question was unimportant—well, it wasn’t pretty where my thoughts led. And that didn’t even have time to fully register before I saw footage of the honors that Lithuania bestowed upon the fallen Americans… a military procession attended by the country’s president, the streets lined with Lithuanian citizens waving American flags and shedding tears for those who had died. That clip was immediately followed by the news of the mustard-blob’s choice to go golfing with the Saudis rather than show up for the dignified transfer of the soldiers’ remains at Dover Air Force Base. I’m not going to tell you where my mind went then. I don’t even want to own it. Suffice to say, I was smoldering mad.

Of course, lots more people in the US got flaming mad when it came to the regime hitting them in their personal pocketbook. When the tyranny tariffs went into effect and the stock market soared downward, the dayglo demon went golfing. His Oligarch-army of ill-advised advisors jumped on the Liars Networks to insist that our retirement and pension plans losing their pants is really just good news and nobody smart suffers from a thing like that. Here is the essence of that sentiment in a mini-history-moment: the story (which some dispute) is that when she was told the people were starving and had no bread, Marie Antoinnette said: “Let them eat cake.”

This left the people of France pretty hot under the collar, and you might remember how they reacted to that… and that part is not in dispute.

The temperature in this country is running way too high, and I’m not talking about the weather. Last Thursday, when the tariffs went into effect, and the Dow took a dive, an array of outrageously affluent autocrat asses appeared to assure us that: The-Market-Crashing-Is-A-Good-Thing! I’m talking to the flatscreen as I chop vegetables for dinner: Yes, you guys keep cheering while the life savings of millions of Americans go up in smoke, and that’s going to create a conflagration.

Because when it hits us square in our own pocketbooks, it feels pretty personal. But it can soon inflame the whole populace. Now, I have been alert to the attempts by this cabal to burn down our democracy for well over a decade, so my mind had already worn pretty deep pathways to all the worst places it could go, having trekked from one outpost of ugliness to another as the evidence of their hideous intent accumulated.

Just like you and everyone else who was affected by the deliberate crashing of the stock market, our household’s hard-earned life savings took a tremendous hit. We have been making every effort to prepare for months, but almost nobody’s savings emerged unscathed from the atomic bomb the malignant malefactor sitting at the top of our government hurled at the global economy with glee last week. Everyone lost—except for those who knew precisely when and how and where it was coming. They sold out in advance, they knew exactly what to buy at the bottom, and they grinned their evil grins while the future stability and security of millions was demolished for sport. And they didn’t care that, for the rest of us, they were burning it all down.

Curiously, even though my husband and I are like everyone else whose 401Ks got blow-torched, that doesn’t feel like the greatest loss we are experiencing. Money comes and money goes, and we have been through times when we had almost none and still managed to survive somehow. But death is forever. Watching the death of our democracy feels like watching helplessly as our home, all our memories, everything we care about, burns to the ground. IN AN ARSON-SET FIRE.

I have lamented in previous posts how few people before now even bothered to look, or were willing to see what was happening here in the hellish hot zone of this takedown regime.

Now, though, now that those folks who have more to lose than the ones who were already losing everything in our society… now we are beginning to see a lot of outrage and indignity. We are seeing people massing at protests with hand-crafted clever signs that show such creativity and courage that they inspire and move us, and we dare to dream of our seared and scarred system of self-governance somehow pulling through. Now, more people see what is happening and are bringing reinforcement to us exhausted long-timers on the front lines.

And they are furious at the Antoinnette analogue of the situation: the richest of the richest of the rich insulting us while they destroy whatever we have eked out of our own hard work for our future. We see that they don’t care. We see them saying: Let them eat 401Kake! And defending their leader lighting the match that burns up all the bread.

The indignity, the outrageous hubris, of having these two-legged tumors fronting for the fascist fat cat regime insult us into the media’s microphones for being alarmed while an economy that was just two months ago dubbed “The Envy of the World” gets nuked. It is starting to feel like there are too many blazes in too many places to identify where and with which efforts we might save this beleaguered country from the doom the death brigade has begun.

Sparks flew when billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik appeared on camera to insist that his mother-in-law wouldn’t utter a peep if she didn’t get her Social Security check, because it’s only a fraudster who would complain, so Let Them Eat 401Kake! A billionaire who has no idea why those who have no bread would complain about starving. Or having their hard-earned-benefits they paid into all their lives taken from them. Hot zone update: Marjorie Taylor Greene performs insider trading moving her money out of the market right before the big nosedive and moving it back in today just in time for the big blast up. This is an Arsonist Autocracy. How can we not be inflamed?

After regaling us time and again with how wonderful the economy was going to be once he took a pretty nearly perfect one from the Biden administration and began destroying it at an astonishing pace, the criminal miscreant at the top of toppling our government now says we have to take some medicine to get well… you know, to get better than having the lowest unemployment rate in nearly a hundred years, the fastest and best recovery from the COVID pandemic in the world, and the highest new jobs rates for a year running, earning that “Envy of the World” description of our financial state on the cover of THE ECONOMIST magazine showing a rocket ship soaring off the platform to symbolize how magnificent our economy was. The same reprobate—lacquered with spray tan and stinking of self-conceit—said in the next breath: “It’s good to win. You heard I won, right?” He was talking about what he really cares about: his golf game. Not us. He doesn’t care about us, nor does he even have a concept of who we are. He doesn’t care if he burns it all down, and us with it.

Now is where I will—as I always do—tell you a story from the WILD. No surprise, this one is another from my days as a wildland firefighter. I was working with a Type II Incident Command Team as a Public Information Officer when I got the call to get onto a plane and go to Arizona, where a trio of lightning-sparked wildfires had merged to create what is known as a Complex Fire. This is a situation that multiplies wildfire danger factors immensely. A complex fire can have multiple hot zones in varying terrains, and often the fire is moving in different directions in different areas, all at the same time. A complex fire is difficult to surround and contain because of this, in addition to the increased size when several fires merge. Fire likes wind, and fires often create their own weather, which can cause winds increasing from one area of the complex and impacting another, or even creating more lightning strikes. It can be a firefighter’s worst nightmare.

And let me tell you some details as part of this story so you can imagine how difficult it is to fight a complex fire. Because you might just be able to relate it to where we are at this moment in our nation.

We weren’t the only incident command team on this fire because of its size and complexity. The morning briefings were so crowded with firefighters, support teams, and media that they looked like a mini-Coachella where everyone wore Nomex, helmets, and boots. After the big briefing, my incident command team would hold its own, and the ops team would take positions around a strategic sandbox that represented the terrain, the assets, and the prioritized areas. There, we were briefed on the plan of attack. And of defense. And remember, we were but one team working in one area.

Our incident commander, Marc1, never minced words, and so my job as information officer was to find a way to convey the simplest essence of the status and the game plan to the press and the public—without the colorful colloquialisms and foul language he so eloquently used. But one thing Marc was known to say often that I repeated verbatim was: The fire doesn’t care.

Our task was always first and foremost to protect lives. Then property—and to especially prioritize critical infrastructure, historic sites, and other particularly vulnerable and valuable areas. In the middle of this three-fire complex, a mountaintop observatory and satellite installation used by NASA, and a telecommunications satellite area that transferred data traveling from the west coast to the east and vice versa, were identified as top priority. Along with the nearby national forest, which contained historic ruins.

The beautiful saguaro forested slopes surrounding these were dotted with residential communities. These communities were at risk, too, and so the county sheriffs issued evacuation orders and sent people door to door to warn those in the path of the fire. We closed major highways to promote the evacuations and to prevent folks from coming back in and creating further risk. We flew in pumpkins—water blivits—by helicopter and placed them in strategic spots for crews to use for mopping up spot-fires that flared up behind the trenches they cut. Hundreds of firefighters worked night and day for nearly a week to try to get a line around the complex and contain a fire that only Mother Nature could extinguish. The heat was nearly unbearable. And the smoke. For the hotshots and front-line crews, Logistics brought in refrigerated reefer trucks lined with bunks from top to bottom on both sides, and the crews that weren’t spiked out in forward camps could retreat to the base camp after a long shift, cool down, and catch a few hours’ sleep in these.

At night, when the fires would lay down in the only-slightly-cooler temperatures, hotshot crews used cannon-like launching systems to hurl flaming orbs into the fire zone to light backfires that would deprive the main blaze of fuel. An elite team of hotshots went into the burn zone and climbed to the observatory and satellite array to create defensible space around them. They hand-dug trenches and used drip torches to create a narrow perimeter to protect. This was laborious, exhausting, heroic work—and they were in great danger every moment they were on the mountain. A change in the wind could bring the blazes back up on them, a wind-driven spark could ignite the area inside the perimeter and burn not only the protected priorities but the hotshots themselves. Like all firefighters, they were trained to deploy their fire shelters in the event of a burnover, but we all knew the chances of survival in such a situation were slim to none.

I worked with the nearby Apache nation to help inform their tribal members and prepare them for evacuation if it was needed. And I worked with local volunteer fire departments and their information officers to get the word out to all the surrounding mountain communities for folks to get their go-kits in their cars and be on ready awareness. When I visited with groups like this, with their leaders and their residents, I used Marc’s catch-phrase a lot to answer their protests about why they didn’t think it was fair for us to make them leave, why they thought they could survive, why they wanted more time, or more protection from the fire teams. “We’re doing everything we can,” I would say, “but the fire doesn’t care… about your art collection… or your horses… or your house, or even how much these mean to you or how much you love them. Get whatever you can to safety in the time you have. Gather whatever you hold most dear, prepare yourself in every way you can, and then be ready to leave it all and flee for your lives if it comes to that. Because the fire doesn’t care.” For some, we were able to give them half a day. For others, just an hour or two. And for those directly in the path of the fire, sheriffs knocked on their doors and give them five minutes. Because the fire was devouring everything in its path and bringing it all to ruination. And the fire didn’t care.

A complex fire is a fair analogy for where we are now in this country. Formidable forces have mounted from numerous directions, and have begun devouring and demolishing our democracy. Citizens who are willfully ignorant and wield their vote fueled by disinformation, or out of self-importance or their worst instincts—or who don’t wield their vote at all—are one part of this complex devastation event. The callousness and corruption in this autocracy is like lightning: striking repeatedly at tinder-dry areas where our democracy is vulnerable…every death-dealing, destructive strike igniting havoc and annihilation of nearly every system of our government and all that it stands for. The all-consuming flames of uncontrolled greed are devouring everything—faster, and in more intensity than we can possibly get a line around and control. Meanwhile, some people just want to complain about how unfair this all is. But the fire doesn’t care. And the oligarch autocrat fascists in this authoritarian regime don’t care. They’re the ones lighting the matches. With impunity.

We are likely going to need to set some kind of a metaphorical backburn to deprive this inferno of a dictatorship of its fuel, to starve it of oxygen and a place to go. As it eats up our government agencies, our administrative infrastructure and support systems, as it attacks our neighbors and threatens our allies, and devours all decency and democratic essentials, we are each standing at the strategic sandbox with our own team, and we are tasked with setting the priorities for what we think might be most important to save. And we are going to have to figure out how. And fast.

So much has already been consumed and burned to the ground. Our constitutional rights and freedoms have to be top priority for protection. Our rule of law must also be among these treasures we are willing to go to the greatest lengths to save. This is not going to be easy work. We are going to need a team of freedom fighters in numbers we have never seen before. And we are going to have to be willing to let some things go in order to starve this all-devouring conflagration.

While they incinerate our rights, our freedoms, and deliberately destroy our life savings and lifeline support systems, they lie to our faces and accuse us of being the frauds if we complain. This is because, like a wildfire, they feel invulnerable, and they don’t care. They don’t care about you and me, about our country, about our constitution, about our allies, about the Ukrainians and their desperate struggle to remain a democracy, about our neighboring nations, about morality, ethics, decency, rights, freedoms, or justice. They don’t think this wildfire they have set will ever come to their doorways. And that is the number one thing we have to have top of mind as we plot our sandbox strategy. They’ve told us they don’t care. Let’s believe them.

Like the Tesla takedown efforts causing the brand’s plummeting stock values, we have to find bold and brave ways to starve their brazen totalitarian takeover. We have to make sure they don’t have what they need to continue to ravage our resources and riches. We can look to other countries to see what has worked when autocrats took over democratically-leaning governments. Mass protests in almost unimaginable numbers that clog the streets and prevent business as usual. Work strikes that leave the systems and infrastructure of their nations crippled until the culprits come to the table with the people.

We can bounce up and down like the stock market and the tariff threats at their whim, and let our minds wander to imagined revenge scenarios… or we can figure out how to build a defensive line around what we care about most, and mount a plan to hold that line. We may have to take risks, suffer losses, and go to great lengths, but if we hold the line and work together, we can perhaps starve the inferno and save what is most precious to us all.

Now back to my story of the complex fire: We mounted a terrific and tremendous battle. It took hundreds and hundreds of firefighters, logistics crews, law enforcement, volunteers, citizens, and local governments, agencies, and tribes, but we managed to save the highest priority areas. And we didn’t lose a single life. We got lucky there. I have been on wildfires where we were not so fortunate, but this one was a huge win in that regard. Some benevolent force smiled on our dedication, our heroes and their efforts, and the unified determination that brought so many together to defeat the blaze…and after days of dry, driving winds and hellish heat, we got a blessed change in the weather. Cooler temperatures, rising humidity, and reduced wind speeds calmed the fire, while the containment lines the team had created kept it from spreading any farther. Ultimately, it ran out of fuel in enough places that it decreased in size so that we could start the mop-up and cold-trailing and deprive it of any fuel at all.

The scars on the sides of the mountains are still visible. But the regrowth began with the next monsoon season, when the winds from the west brought big rainstorms that briefly soaked the desert with enough life-giving water for the local flora to begin growing back. But it will be a long, long time before you will see again the healthy environment that was there before the fire. Still, every sign of life returning brings hope.

Today, the mad king abruptly reversed course and created a 90-day pause in the tariffs that took us all careening madly from having anything to having nothing and then perhaps back to having a little of what we managed to put by. Meanwhile, they still care so little that they defend their words and methods with inane lies and caustic comments. They don’t know us. They don’t know what is of real value to us. They don’t know how many of us do not have much, and how many lived in fear that whatever we had saved had gone up in smoke. They do not care.

I don’t think this complex conflagration is anywhere near over. There are many more of us awake and aware to the danger now. In spite of this, I honestly don’t know how much of our democracy we can save, or if we can save it at all. And even if somehow we manage to pull through this latest deliberately-ignited hellstorm, will we survive the next? If we can, I don’t know how many of us it will take or how long. I can imagine that it is going to take extraordinary measures by astounding numbers of us, and it may be an arduously long fight.

But what else are we going to do? Sit quiet, don’t look, and do nothing while they throw the next match?

I don’t think so. I still have my boots and my helmet, and I still remember a thing or two about fighting fire with fire…and with good information….and with shrewd strategy and hard work and determination. And I do care. How about you?

1 – If you’re interested, my book WILD INFERNO—while a fun read as a mystery—is also an homage to my days as a wildland firefighter. And it is dedicated to the many bold and brave firefighters I served with, including the incident commander mentioned here—who, after responding to the horrors of the 911 incident—just could not reclaim joy in his life. He had seen too much and fought too hard. He made the choice to leave us just as his courtesy copy from the publisher of WILD INFERNO arrived in his mailbox. I regret that he never got to see his name in the acknowledgements.

Sandi Ault—Reporting from the WILD offers powerful storytelling about the things we care about. A blend of WILD adventure tales, meaningful messaging, and potent political and social insights