Wildland fire and conversations that are civil

A few days ago the country celebrated Juneteenth, the day that General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston in 1865 - two months after the effective end of the Civil War when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox courthouse - and announced to the men, women, and children who were still suffering through slavery that they were now free. They were advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They were informed that they would not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they would also not be supported in idleness.

I was asked to talk about Juneteenth along with several others at a local celebration, so I spent some time thinking about what this day represents – a day chosen to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. Ten or maybe 15 years ago I hadn’t heard of Juneteenth, and then when I did I was confused because I knew that the day that the announcement was made in Galveston wasn’t the day that people of African descent were no longer subject to being enslaved. And I thought, “Why now?...Why Texas?...What’s with that weird name?” The history is kind of confusing so I thought perhaps I’d go over the history. But then I thought that if people don’t know what Juneteenth is or how it came about, they can just Google it.

I considered a few other approaches, but basically I was at a loss as to what to talk about.

I’d had a short conversation with Doug Shoemaker, Chief of Police in my hometown of Grand Junction in western CO a couple of days before. Afterwards I was struck with the similarities, or maybe lessons I’ve learned, between wildland fires that I still help manage and the struggle Black America has realizing the full Promise of America.

There’s an atmosphere on fires that I notice on almost every fire I’ve ever been on. People up and down the chain of command are almost universally respectful of each other. People are civil and polite to one another. They share their knowledge in order to educate and help others become a more effective member of the fire suppression team so that working together they can get the job done. Fires are complex, and although the leader has a plan, he or she looks for allies…for team buy-in to the plan so that a high level of mutual understanding and mission develops.

I write a post every once in a while and the chief pointed out that my last few posts have seemed kinda angry, and I confess, they have been. Maybe inappropriately so. Those posts came immediately after the clearly racially motivated mass murder in Buffalo NY and then the mass murder of young children in Uvalde TX.  So yeah, I was angry. I still am and I suspect that it's a challenge for all of us to not be angry about so much hate and violence. But lessons learned – or at least contemplated. Let your anger and frustration be there. Let it propel you into action. But don’t let it consume you. And don’t wear it on your sleeve. As we act to move that stubborn needle on what I refer to as ‘America’s race thing’, and as our anger and frustration sometimes builds, it’s important to remember who your audience is and how loaded any conversation about race is. You can lose your audience with one word that they take offense to. Or one angry tone. There’s no sense engaging your audience if you’re just going to lose them.

There’s a book, White Fragility. I’m not a big fan of this long-time best seller. I think that it’s condescending to white people. But there’s a chapter that I like and that even made me chuckle. It’s titled ‘Rules of Engagement’. It’s about three pages long and is just a list of how to talk to white people about race in a manner that they don’t turn away. Everything on that list is true. Rule number one – don’t appear angry.

Be respectful. Be civil. Educate – give your audience some knowledge and perspective. Create an ally, not an enemy.

I thought about how fires are complex. But even so, putting them out shouldn’t and doesn’t take forever. With over 500 miles of hand line – the distance from San Francisco to Tijuana Mexico - an additional 500 miles of dozer line, over 200 miles of hose on the ground, some 3,000 people at its peak, and 80 days into it, the Calf Canyon Fire in northern NM, the fire that I am on as I write this, is complex. But we’re going to put it out somewhere around July 31st.

America’s ‘Race thing’ is complex too. But we don’t seem to be too close to putting that fire out. We get excited because June 19th gets federal holiday status 157 years after the event, or because Judge Jackson, a Black woman, gets nominated and confirmed to the Supreme court 231 years after the court’s first assembly. It took fifteen years of bitter fighting to honor the Reverend Martin Luther King with a holiday. I’m just not sure any of that feels all that celebratory. It feels more like a snail’s pace. Of course, holidays and judicial appointments are not what we’re really after. We’re after the same opportunities with the same amount of effort that white America has.

I hear two things more often than I ever would have thought – “This takes time” (it does) and “We’re making progress” (we are). But to put that into perspective, in 1961 Jack Kennedy set as a goal that we were going to the moon. Eight years later we were there.  In just a few generations we went from horse and buggy to jet travel and in even less time we eradicated smallpox, measles, polio, diphtheria, and a bunch of other diseases. If the country can do all of that when we put our minds and collective will into it…if we can develop a vaccine to a deadly pandemic in less than a year - then we know that dismantling our race thing doesn't really need to take hundreds of years. That just means that either the country isn’t really serious about it, or that the country doesn’t understand how damaging our race thing is to the entire country.

But…having said all that, I’ll quote you something uplifting that I read on June 19th  in the New York Times, “Juneteenth has been, and still is, a day for feasting, and if you feel like it, singing and dancing. But above all, it is a day for celebrating the ideals of freedom and equality — not only in the nation’s laws but in the hearts and minds of one another.”

Yeah…the ideals of freedom and equality.