Properly Subversive/Sherman R. Frederick
The killer wildfire on Maui shouts out an important lesson for the Bay Area: Common sense must trump equity.
Consider these sad facts now being reported out of Hawaii.
- Hawaii’s state Department of Land and Natural Resources waited 5 hours to make water available to fight the Lahaina fires.
- Kaleo Manuel, an equity-spousing bureaucrat, wanted to get permission from a downstream taro farmer. He never did find the taro farmer. By the time he released the water to fight the fire, Lahaina town was well on the way to utter destruction with 100+ people incinerated. Scores of children still unaccounted for, presumed dead.
- After the story broke about this horrible misjudgment, the state relieved Kaleo Manuel of his water duties and transferred him to another job. He is now unavailable for comment.
In a livestream debate last year, Manuel described water as a “sacred god”.
“Let water connect us and not divide us,” said Manuel, referring to water distribution on the island “We can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity…How do we coexist with the resources we have?”
That sounds oh, so pretty. But the practical result of that thinking resulted in Manuel in time of disaster withholding water from firefighters.
Unconscionable, really.
It serves as a warning to all – especially here in the Bay Area where “equity” thinking has become embedded in the bureaucracy. Case in point: In Marin when it comes to road repairs, some roads are prioritized not on the need of repair but on whether they are more racist than other roads.
I am not kidding. Marin County moms and dads dress up this policy with nice-sounding equity language, but it’s this kind of thinking that had Maui’s water czar delay water to firefighters for five hours. Roads should be repaired on need, not to address a perceived wrong committed in the historical past.
In the face of disaster, and in disaster preparedness, I’d rather us have a no-nonsense first-responder mentality, rather than having some equity warrior doing ivory-tower calculations while people suffer. That’s all I’m saying.
Let’s learn from Hawaii’s mistakes.
D.A. FIGHT
In the public fight between Marin D.A. Lori Frugoli and Alameda D.A. Pamela Price, D.A. Price suffered a stinging jab to her public perception last week when the media revealed she hired her boyfriend as a “senior program specialist” in the office. Nepotism, anyone?
Meanwhile, D.A. Frugoli took a glancing blow to her competency, when the Marin County Board of Supervisors launched a probe into the Marin Civil Grand Jury report that concluded Frugoli’s office is the primary reason justice has ground to a halt in Marin.
We’ll keep you posted on further developments.
HELLO, MR. ORWELL
In my ever-fatter “Gud Gawd Almighty” file comes a story out of San Jose. A church there is suing Santa Clara County for allegedly using “geofencing” to spy on congregants during the pandemic. I hope it’s not true. But if it is, everybody in Santa Clara County who had anything to do with it ought to be fired. Once again from my bunker high atop Mt. Tam in Marin, I must sound the alarm for all good people to hear: When the full-on police state comes to America, it will come from the intellectual political left. Resistance is NOT futile.
ONE MORE THING
From a list of bad analogies used in actual high school essays, here are my top three:
– She had him like a toenail stuck in a shag carpet.
– Her eyes twinkled like the mustache of a man with a cold.
– She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room temperature Canadian beef.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading “Properly Subversive,” bringing you observations you otherwise may never read in the Bay Area. See you next time. Until then avoid knuckleheads, laugh a little and always question authority.
(“Properly Subversive” is a commentary written by Sherman R. Frederick for Marinscope Community Newspapers, the “mother ship” of the Novato Advance, San Rafael News-Pointer, Mill Valley Herald, Ross Valley Reporter, Twin City Times and the Sausalito Marin Scope. Mr. Frederick is an award-winning journalist and co-founder of Battle Born Media, a news organization dedicated to the preservation of community newspapers. You can reach him by email at shermfrederick@gmail.com.)
That was not a good call regardless of any political or agricultural ?connsiderations.