"Who Says There's No Good News?"

In the Santa Barbara fire area where 30,000 people had to evacuate, over 29,000 have returned to find their homes unharmed. And by the time the people being kept out by access problems return, it should be almost 29,800. That’s a great job by firefighters from all over (as I observed Friday), and the weather stopped helping spread the fire in the nick of time (good thing it’s still capable of doing that). But also:

Fire officials praised residents for aggressively cutting back brush that could have fueled the blaze.

“More homes would have burned had they not done their defensible space work,” Santa Barbara County Fire Chief Tom Franklin said.

Yes, those wimpy liberal socialist Californians actually cooperated with the authorities. I can imagine a similar fire in a community full of teabaggers ending differently (the majority will probably agree logically that clearing ground is a good thing, but enough will insist on ‘doing it MY way’ to give a wildfire a lot of help). Yes, I went there.

One thing that makes me really happy living in a rental unit in a scenic location on the edge of nowhere is having a landlord who is very diligent about the “defensible space work”, maybe beyond what he is required to do. (It’s also nice to be yards away from a well-maintained US Highway in case the firebreaks are ever not enough.)

And while I’m expressing my offensive opinions, there’s an obvious reason why Firefighters have a more positive image than Police, Teachers, or most other “public servants”. Because it’s the one job that has nothing to appeal to people looking for a Personal Power Trip. What can a ‘bad apple’ firefighter do to a person, come around when there’s no fire and spray his firehose in all your windows? (Is this something I’d need to watch the TV show “Rescue Me” to know about?)