Defund The Fire Department!

The attention that has been drawn to police misconduct has had us rethinking everything we thought we knew about how we should address problems with the delivery of public services.

We know that of the 650,000-plus police officers in this country in 2019, approximately 30 to 35 unarmed people were killed by police, 10 to 15 of whom were black.

How are we to interpret the fact that as many as .0053% of police officers were involved in questionable shootings? Should we treat it as the very serious problem it is and double down on training, establish methods to monitor accountability, and continue to refine systems and incorporate best practices to ensure we reduce these awful and needless fatalities?

Of course not. When you have as many as 1 bad apple out of every 18,500 police officers, the only mature, reasonable thing to do is to act rashly and without any consideration as to the consequences of your actions.

No one said it better than our current poet-philosopher and spokesperson for Nike (Now over 50% slave labor free!), Colin Kaepernick:

The white supremacist institution of policing that stole Breonna Taylor’s life from us must be abolished for the safety and well being of our people. #BreonnaTaylor #SayHerName #AbolishThePolice

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 23, 2020

Indeed, the police must be abolished for the safety and well-being of our people.

But why stop there?  Now that we have established a new threshold at which abolishment of an institution is not only necessary but the only reasonable course of action to protect us, we need to look beyond the police.

And draw our attention to the fire department.

Look at the numbers.

Out of a little over 1 million firefighters, at least 100 are arrested for arson every year.

That’s one out of every 10,000 firefighters, meaning there are proportionally nearly twice the number of bad firefighters as there are bad cops.

Should we address this problem directly, focusing on the 100 while preserving the firefighting function? You already know the answer. We can’t have the systemic arson of the firefighter system endangering us at every turn, worried that if we call the fire department, say, to get a cat out of a tree, there is a very good infinitesimally slight chance they will set fire to our own house instead!

That is why the fire department must be abolished for the safety and well-being of our houses. We can redirect the funds formerly spent on fighting fires to counselors trained in dealing with the natural grief that comes when your house burns to the ground.

The “Kaepernick Rule” can be applied beyond just public policy and effectively be used in your daily life. Fuel pump goes out in your car? Junk it, junk the whole thing. Throw it out. Its systemic fuel delivery problems must be addressed with a kind of frenzied lunacy if we’re ever going to get automobiles that work perfectly every time forever.

Is that too much to ask?

Fixing systems, addressing genuine problems directly in a sober and serious fashion is just not going to cut it anymore. What needs to be done now is to address every issue by engaging in wild mindless fury  and destroying everything we come across.

Only then can we truly have peace.

We’ll also still need a civilization, but how hard can building one of those be?

J.