Monday Reads: Raking Bad

Finnish woman trolls Trump

Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!

I’m one tired old lady and there’s a long list of things wearing me out including a record breaking cold snap which always bests me and my drafty old house. Then, there’s me waiting and listening for the status of my many friends in California and their various fur babies. I have one friend still sitting in his apartment in Chico, basically surrounded by smoke.

The pictures are overwhelming and the stories even more so. What makes it even more awful is that the Placeholder in the White House thinks that lazy Californians just don’t rake enough leaves and so they ask for these deadly, destructive infernos. Oh, and he can’t even keep the name of the totally destroyed Paradise, California straight. He miscalled it “Pleasure” several times while visiting what remains. This man is a clear and present danger to all living things.

The people he visited were less than enthusiastic. This included some of his voters.

When President Donald Trump rolled into town Saturday, some Camp Fire evacuees in Chico shelters felt like they were a world away, though they were mere miles apart.

Trump joined Gov. Jerry Brown and Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom in the morning for a tour of the devastation to the Paradise area and a visit to the incident base in Chico before heading to Southern California in the early afternoon.

Some evacuees were grateful for his visit. Others were relieved they didn’t have to shake his hand. A few had no idea the president was in Butte County at all.

Paradise resident Michael Reasons, who has been staying at the Neighborhood Church evacuation center in Chico, said that Trump’s visit meant “nothing” to him. Reasons, 50, was walking around with signs for his missing dog Saturday afternoon.

“For me, it doesn’t make a bit of difference,” he said. “I know what kind of person he really is.”

What those impacted by the fire really need right now is positivity, and to know that they are genuinely cared about, Reasons said.

“He really has a hard time showing compassion for, you know, people,” Reasons said. “I don’t really have a lot of respect for the guy.”

Ambrose Reuter, a 68-year-old Paradise resident, said he didn’t vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016 because he didn’t like either candidate, but he appreciated the president paying a visit.

“It meant a lot that he came out personally,” Reuter said between bites of KFC chicken outside of the church.

Paradise resident Laura Owens, who described herself as a Trump supporter, struggled to answer when asked what it meant to her that the President came out. Owens, 46, has been staying at the East Avenue Church in Chico with her three teenagers, parents and two dogs.

The first night, they slept in a tent outside because the shelter was at capacity, she said.

“I heard he was coming, but that’s so far out of this realm,” Owens said. “Even though that’s amazing and it would have been nice if he had come here, I can’t think about that.”

Meanwhile, Paradise resident Joe Redfern, 72, said he was relieved that Trump didn’t make a stop at the East Avenue Church. He suggested that the visit was purely politically motivated.

“He’s only doing this because politically, he’s being forced to do it,” Redfern said. “I don’t think he knows how to show empathy, sympathy. I don’t know how else to describe it, but Donald is for Donald.”

Glenn Murray, of Chico, held a similar opinion. Murray, 53, evacuated to the church from Chico on Nov. 8 and even though the evacuation has been lifted from east Chico, he has returned night after night to visit with the friends he made there.

“He realized California has a lot of money and a lot of power,” he said. “He realized he can’t do what he did in Puerto Rico.”

Paradise resident Kimberly Comeau, age 50, who lost her home on Clark Road, had just a few words about the president’s trip.

“Is he going to throw paper towels at us?” she asked.

Probably the weirdest Trump thing on the fires is what we now know as the “Finnish Forest Raking” method of Forest Fire prevention which is another one of those things cooked up from the Dotard’s brain.

You gotta rake it till you make it.

After President Donald Trump suggested Finland has few wildfires because the nation spends a lot of time “raking and cleaning” forest floors, many were confused. Not least of all the Finns themselves — or the Californians Trump was visiting, whose state has been devastated by fires that have killed at least 76 and burned hundreds of thousands of acres in the past two weeks.

But confused or not, Finns took to social media — vacuum at hand — to prove their dedication to their newfound civic duty.

Under the hashtag #haravointi (“raking”), some Finns spent this weekend grabbing their gardening tools — with the more creative types picking up their vacuums and Roomba devices — and visiting the woods to document their public service.

“Just this afternoon I was busy meeting my raking quota,” one tweet reads.

“Taking pride in a good day’s work maintaining the forest,” says another.

The Finns might not have been serious, but the US president seemed to be. During his visit to Northern California Saturday, Trump told reporters that America should follow the lead of Scandinavian nations like Finland, which “spend a lot of time” on forest preservation.

The Finnish President, of course, denies the entire thing.

Finnish President Sauli Niinistö said in an interview published Sunday that although President Donald Trump claimed the European leader told him Finns rarely have forest fires because they “spend a lot of time raking,” he doesn’t recall discussing that with Trump when they met last weekend in Paris.

Niinistö told the Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, a CNN affiliate, that the subject of raking was never brought up in his conversations with Trump. He said that they did discuss the California wildfires when they met, and that he told Trump “we take care of our forests.”

The Finnish President told the newspaper that he intended to convey that although Finland is covered by forests, the nation has a good monitoring system which has helped to prevent catastrophic wildfires. He added that he only sees raking in his own yard, and surmised that raking perhaps came to Trump’s mind after he saw firefighters raking some of the burned areas in California.

Still, Trump mentioned raking while surveying the devastation in Northern California on Saturday.

Trump always turns a national disaster into some kind of Monty Python parody of the Minstry of Mayem and Mishap. But, the devastation and loss of life from the fire is real. As usual, the heros are local.

Jeff Evans steers his white Dodge Ram along a narrow dirt road, scanning the blackened trees and ashen ground for two skittish dogs

They come running when they hear the truck, and Evans offers them dog biscuits from the big red box of Milk-Bones he keeps on his floorboard. Good, he said, giving them a pat. They’re doing OK. He can move along.

Checking on the dogs is just one chore on Evans’ list. He’s one of a handful of people left in Concow, Calif., a mountain hamlet tucked deep in the woods that has been under mandatory evacuation orders since the Camp fire tore through here Nov. 8. If he leaves, he can’t get back in.

His neighbors stuck on the outside have been emailing him requests. Because the gas in the generator powering his electricity — and his internet — is limited, he hops online for a few minutes each day, answers their questions and gets going.

“Every single morning until the afternoon, I’m huffing it,” Evans said. “I’m going and going and going. There’s pigs to feed and goats and ducks and chickens.”

Not to mention the eight dogs he’s rescued.

“We’re stuck here anyhow,” he added. “We may as well do something valuable.”

A thin man with a bushy mustache and a quick laugh, Evans, 59, has become an unofficial keeper of Concow. Neighbors send him addresses and ask if he could please go see whether their houses burned down. Almost always, the answer is yes.

From Chico, the nearest city outside the massive evacuation zone, thick smoke obscures the Sierra foothills towns and their devastation.

Okay, this is a story near and dear to my heart because as a fifth grader I started asking my school if I could just opt out of the pledge of allegiance. I felt that there were a lot of nice countries–naming England as one–with flags and similar stated goals. Why not do something like recite the Preamble to the Constitution instead? I remember being being threatened by a Girl Scout Troop leader who thought I shouldn’t be a scout if that’s how I felt.

I do remember suddenly, the pledge disappeared from classrooms in all of the District. I was never sure why though. It could’ve been a visit from my mother or quite likely a District lawyer that showed them they were on the wrong side of the constitution and a SCOTUS decision and any law suit. So, that was around 1966 and you would think since the big court decision was way back in the 1940s that would be that. But, then there is this: “Student who refuses to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance expelled, Texas attorney general backs school” from USA Today.

Months after a student was expelled for refusing to stand for her school’s Pledge of Allegiance, the Texas Attorney General is intervening on the school’s behalf.

The mother of Windfern High School senior India Landry launched a legal battle against the Houston-area school, saying her daughter wasn’t able to practice free speech.

India, now 18, was sent home last year after sitting during the pledge. Her mother, Kizzy Landry, said when she came to pick up India, the school provided little details as to why her daughter was kicked out. Later, the principal told the mother”She can’t come to my school if she won’t stand for the pledge.”

India said she sat during the pledge before this incident, and wasn’t punished.

“I don’t think that the flag is what it says it’s for, for liberty and justice and all that. It’s not obviously what’s going on in America today,” India said last year.

Months after a student was expelled for refusing to stand for her school’s Pledge of Allegiance, the Texas Attorney General is intervening on the school’s behalf.

The mother of Windfern High School senior India Landry launched a legal battle against the Houston-area school, saying her daughter wasn’t able to practice free speech.

India, now 18, was sent home last year after sitting during the pledge. Her mother, Kizzy Landry, said when she came to pick up India, the school provided little details as to why her daughter was kicked out. Later, the principal told the mother”She can’t come to my school if she won’t stand for the pledge.”

India said she sat during the pledge before this incident, and wasn’t punished.

“I don’t think that the flag is what it says it’s for, for liberty and justice and all that. It’s not obviously what’s going on in America today,” India said last year.

There was also a lot of ruckus about this when students started refusing to stand for the pledge during Vietnam War protests. This isn’t a new thing and it’s certainly something that I thought was decided by the courts decades again. But then, everything unconstitutional is now up for debate again. From Lawyers.com:

As far back as 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that requiring all public school students to recite the pledge of allegiance was a violation of their First Amendment rights, because free speech includes the right not to speak against your beliefs (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)). And as the Court made clear more than 20 years later, public schools must also respect students right to express their opinions through actions (known as “symbolic speech”), as long as they aren’t being too disruptive (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969).)

The Supreme Court hasn’t directly addressed the issue of students refusing to stand for the pledge or the national anthem—clear examples of symbolic speech. But federal appellate courts have agreed that public schools may not force students to stand during the pledge. And just as public schools (including colleges and universities) shouldn’t punish students for exercising their First Amendment rights, they also shouldn’t withhold privileges—like participation in school sports—for the same actions.

Texas is wrong on this but then I assume they’re going to keep dragging it through the court process to see if Trump has stacked the courts enough to get a different result. Some folks will just not be convinced that this country and its people are not their personal christianist pisspot.

So, that’s it for me. I need to get back to grading oh, and maybe some raking around Swamplandia.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?