Get REAL- Question everything!

I don't currently have a computer capable of making AMVs without combusting, but "Ruin Me" by Sebastian Schub is just. Such a perfect fucking Hollanov song. So. Illustration.

This is a really, really difficult conversation because there is so, so much nuance. Without knowing more about this guy specifically and this fire specifically, I can't speak to this exact incident. But I will happily speak to the phenomenon of holdouts in general!

For clarity: holdouts are anyone who refuses to leave an area during an evacuation, whether it is for a wildfire or otherwise. What rights they have to do this is going to vary depending upon where they are, but we're not going to dig into the laws in this specific post.

Now, firstly, what this article says about holdouts posing a danger to emergency personnel who may have to go back in and get them, and the fact that it can take people away from fighting the fire, is very true. But every situation is going to be so, so different and there is never going to be a clearcut right answer, ESPECIALLY with how fast wildfires can move and how quickly conditions can change.

When talking about holdouts, and evacuations in general, the way we go about it...ah...sucks. It sucks. And it needs to change. These are people's homes, their livelihoods. Many people in the United States in wildfire prone areas no longer have home insurance, or if they do they're massively underinsured, because there is a major crisis with insurance availability in these areas right now. Not sure if Canada is any different, but I'm sure it is still a massively daunting and time consuming process. Not to mention an insurance payout, even if it IS a good one, will never get you back your mementos, your photos, and other one of a kind things. Fighting a fire to defend your home can feel like a less scary, less daunting concept than trying to deal with it burning down, right up until the fire is on your doorstep, and then suddenly it is a lot more real, and losing the house doesn't sound quite so bad when your life is on the line.

For the person making an evacuation call, it can be all to easy to forget these things in the heat of the moment, especially if that person doesn't have good emergency management training. And many don't! At least not on the scale of dealing with evacuating a whole town at the drop of a hat. They may have taken a class or two, done an online training, but they've likely never dealt with anything close to the real deal. And even if they DO have even somewhat good Emergency Management training, they even more rarely have any sort of good public information officer training (and, in my opinion, the standards for "good" PIO training are also dogshit, but that's another post for another day). So their ability to share good information effectively is, at best, also poor. Thus you've frequently got situations where bad information is shared badly and. Well. That's not exactly a recipe for success.

It is also all too easy to just not fully comprehend that what YOU know as a cop/firefighter/whatever is not what the general public knows. It might make sense to evacuate TO YOU. YOU might see all the different little factors that have come together to make evacuation the right call, YOU might fully understand the risks, YOU might know what support systems are going to show up to help the people you're telling to evacuate. But the people you're telling to evacuate by and large DON'T know those things. It's literally the XKCD comic:

On top of all of that, evacuation decisions are NOT easy to make, especially for wildfires. Wildfires can move so fast, and so erratically (especially in urban environments), that planning for a mass evacuation can sometimes be straight up impossible. You don't know where that fire is going to go, what routes might get cut off, what routes could get clogged up. Sometimes, it isn't just an evacuation decision, it is a decision on where you want people to die. Do you leave them spread out in their individual homes and hope that gives more people more of a chance to make it through, or do you concentrate them all onto the roads and hope like hell that road doesn't get impacted by the fire and kill everyone in one spot? Especially in towns with limited roads in and out, it can be an impossible decision to make.

THEN there's the fact that the way we handle wildfires has changed so, so much in the last 60-70ish years. Fighting wildfires used to be much more community based. Everyone pitched in somehow. Men fought the fire, women helped run the camp, teenagers did odd jobs, little kids ran messages. There were specialized teams that came in from out of the area to help, but not to the level we have today where the outside teams fully take over and straight up disallow much, if any, local assistance or support.

Now we're at a point in time where wildfires aren't really handled by their local community, but more and more communities are experiencing wildfires, and experiencing them in ways that used to be much, much rarer. So they don't know how to handle it as well, because they're not familiar with fire. But the teams that are coming in also don't know how to handle it as well, because they're not familiar with the community, just the fire. It's a very obnoxious little Catch-22.

When you put all of this together, the phenomenon of holdouts makes sense, I think. People just want to protect their homes, they may not feel like they have any safety net if they lose their homes, information sharing about evacuation necessity isn't great, evacuations can be dangerous in and of themselves, and the way wildfires are managed now is much different than it used to be. Then the reality comes crashing down on their heads as soon as the fire crests the hill, and they realize there's a very good chance they are about to die.

And sometimes it's none of that. Sometimes people are just stubborn or obstinate.

So what's the answer here? I honestly don't know. I think the whole system needs overhauled, but that's something that takes time, and fire season is now so bad and so constant we don't have the time.

I'm suddenly, viscerally reminded of the other side of this issue, Communications are DOWN and/or there's no way out.

10 years later and the telecom companies are STILL not required to unlock the radio antenna on the cellular phones they sell!

Oil Sands Man camps continue to be poorly constructed and staffed.

and.. as always, First Nations are completely ignored by safety systems.

Alberta senator Kristopher Wells is putting on a different hat on Aug. 6, when he makes his personal collection of over 300 queer picture books available to the public for the first time. Wells is partnering with the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Canada to release the collection, and it is believed to be the largest collection of its kind in the world.  The collection includes books dating back nearly 50 years, which document LGBTQ2S+ life for young readers. IBBY Canada is the Canadian chapter of IBBY International, a non-profit organization that, since 1953, has worked to bring together children and books. Wells will participate in the opening ceremonies for IBBY’s 40th World Congress in Ottawa this week, the first held in Canada. The four-day conference will explore the theme “Listening to Each Other’s Voices,” and Wells’s collection fits in perfectly with this theme, which includes a focus on gender, sex and sexuality. 

you are DOING THE WORK of FASCISTS and AUTHORITARIANISM

To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler

You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it

If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life

If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.

Go through a sensory checklist.

SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights

SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.

TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?

TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?

SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?

INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.

Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.

This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.

us americans currently live in a state actively continuing the largest genocide in history against its indigenous people

rightfully so, leftists and people with a moral compass are deeply disturbed by what's happening to palestine, and i think it's in part because we're outsiders not yet desensitized to violence against palestinians

but we also turn a blind eye to reservations where the government is actively depriving indigenous communities of adequate land, food, independence, sanitation, drinking water, and who continues to aid the collective forgetting of indigenous culture

north america was a whole ass world y'all, with civilizations as significant and massive as rome, and we know basically NOTHING about that world because our government has actively destroyed and buried it

the genocide is still ongoing; indigenous people are still here, fighting to preserve their culture and languages, and it's happening right now in your backyard

some very true statements from talesfrommaurea

one of the most radical things we can do is contribute to spreading palestinian culture and documenting its history, because if we've learned anything from the indigenous genocides, it's that erasure upholds the forced disappearance of a people

do not stop talking and learning about palestine