Remember Smokey the Bear? “Only YOU can prevent forest fires!”
Yeah, that’s the one. I grew up seeing Smokey commercials and signs and decals. I never thought much about it; I took it as given, as so dead obvious that it didn’t need to be said, that I would of course be careful and try not to start forest fires or wildfires. I never took it in the way it has been turned into a joke – though I do think the joke is funny.
This one:
I especially like the image in the third panel, because to me it implies that Smokey has a deeper reality than the one presented in the other three panels, a far grander role in the universe – which to me implies that he is, in fact, an avatar of some greater cosmic or supernatural force, and lil Timmy would be wise to obey, even if the other people around them are telling Timmy that the bear is mad and should not be listened to; I also really like that Timmy still shows doubt in the fourth panel. Because he knows: the bear may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
I never took it that way, not really; but I have come to understand it now. It’s two things: first, English pronouns are stupid, and we should never have abandoned “Thee” and “Thou;” and second, the meme, the joke, are representative of the way we too often view our world and our role in it. It’s that second one I want to speak to, to try to debunk – though I am also happy to speak to that first one.
Sure, why don’t we start with that. You see, the problem is that we only have one second-person pronoun: you. In all instances of pronoun use (other than the possessive pronoun “yours,” but that’s a somewhat different situation), which is even dumber – because while the subjective first person is “I” or “We,” and the objective first person is “me” or “us,” and the third person gives us several options for subject and object pronouns – he/him, she/her, it/it, they/them – for second person it is only “You.” You are my friend. You are reading this post. I published it for you. I give you my thoughts. If we had retained “thee” and “thou,” then the singular second person would be easier and clearer – Thou are (art) the chosen one; the task of preventing forest fires belongs to thee – and only the plural second person would continue to be dumb – You (all) are good people, but too much weight has been placed on you (all). And it would be dumb in a way that couldn’t be fixed by the use of “y’all,” though that particular colloquialism does solve the singular/plural debacle. (Except we often use plural pronouns to represent a single person…)
So the problem with pronouns, applied to Smokey, is that we hear the singular “you” – meaning my own solitary self, just Lil Timmy – because we are reading it, because we are watching the commercials, because we are seeing the signs, all individually, in our own heads. Smokey is speaking to ME and ME alone. But he’s not: he’s speaking to all of us. Only WE can prevent forest fires. Meaning humans. All of us.
How do I know? Because here are two more Smokey ads.
See, this is the distinction that Smokey is trying to make: the animals, in their infinite cuteness (Sorry: the bunnies are infinitely cute. The foxes look concerned. Smokey believes in us, and the elk is trusting Smokey to make the call and is warning us not to let the bear down. The quail [Pheasant? Guinea fowl? What is that large round bird next to the raccoon, the one with the awesome crest and the fashionable glasses?] is already disappointed in us, and is giving up – and I’m pretty sure that all of the other animals, the squirrel, the fawn, the skunk, the raccoon, and the duck, are warning us about the chipmunk. Who, since it is sitting on a perfectly flat stump, probably has a chainsaw stashed away somewhere – and it’s just aching to break that bad boy out and start chopping us into pieces.) cannot stop forest fires: but we humans can. And here’s how:
We – all of us, all of “you” from Smokey’s perspective – can prevent forest fires simply by caring, and being careful. Because, of course, we are the ones who cause the fires, because we don’t care, because we aren’t careful. See, Smokey’s not telling us – me, and you the individual reading this right now – that we are the Chosen One(s), who must roam the forest night after night, putting out sparks, cutting firelines, flying the firefighting planes and dropping water on hotspots. He’s telling us that we simply have to care enough to not be careless when we are in a position to start a fire.
Matches, campfires, and cigarette butts. That’s what we need to do: be careful with those things, those sources of ignition. Not take on the whole task by our lonesome, not even join the fight and put out fires; just be careful with the danger that we, individually, pose. I’m not a camper, so I don’t have much to do with campfires; but I smoked cigarettes for almost twenty years, and you know how many fires I started? Well – one, which destroyed my room and my possessions and could have burned down the house. But I never started any wildfires!
And that, right there, is why Smokey had to keep reminding us, keep telling us, keep asking us – pleading with us – to just do what is obviously the absolute minimum: do not allow our own stupid, lazy indifference to our world lead to that world’s destruction. Like telling me that the best way I can prevent murder is not to commit murder, the best way I can fight rape is not to rape. (And, you know what? That’s not enough, but it would be a good minimum standard.) The first four words of the Hippocratic Oath, which I use as my first and most important classroom rule with all of my students – and I include the Latin, just to be fancy and try to impart to my students how serious and important this is: First, Do No Harm. (Primum non nocere, if you also want to be fancy, and remember Latin uses a hard “K” sound for “c.” [We won’t talk about Iulius Kaiser…]) Because as careful as I always was with the fires that I started twenty times a day, three inches from my own face, I wasn’t always careful: and once I did start a fire. And it did harm, though fortunately only to me. And I guess a little harm to my landlord – but also, fuck him, he owned like thirty properties in Santa Cruz, California, the most expensive place in the country, and he charged high rent and did exactly zero maintenance. He wasn’t as cute as those forest critters.
Other than that chipmunk. Who’s really starting to freak me out. It’s got those beady little eyes. Dead eyes. Doll’s eyes. And okay, the blue patch behind the stump is Smokey’s denim-clad legs – but do you see what looks like a curved handle on the left side of that stump? Is that the chainsaw? Is that little rodent about to rip it, scream “GROOVY!” and charge out of the picture, straight at us?
Would we deserve it if it did?
Would you?
If you do the minimum, then you don’t deserve it. I mean that: just the minimum. Just – do no harm. Care. Be careful. Put out your matches and campfires and cigarette butts, and make sure they are really out. Don’t do something stupid, like I did that one time – but will never do again. If you have made a mistake before, like I did, then learn from it, and be better. Be careful. That’s enough, even if it doesn’t feel like enough. It is enough, because the “you” in Smokey’s admonition is not only you, alone: it’s all of us.
That’s the key: and I’ll be clear in a moment what I actually mean by that. The truth is, that if we ALL do our part, do the bare minimum by keeping ourselves from doing harm, then everyone will have kept themselves from doing harm, and there won’t be any harm done. And that, in all honesty, would work with — almost everything.
If we all do the minimum, if we’re just careful, each and every one of us, then that would solve the problem: because we are the problem. All we need to do is stop being the problem. Care enough to not be the one who starts the fire.
Please.
Do you know why I’m talking about this? It’s not because I’m concerned about actual forest fires. Not because we’re deep into fire season, and with the extra rain from El Nino, it’s going to be a bad season this year (though, because I do want to avoid getting Texas Massacred by Chip/Dale there, I would like us all to be a little more careful with fires right now. Please.). But because we’re deep into another season, a different kind of dangerous season, and the climax of it is only four weeks away.
Because it’s election season.
And only we can prevent a fascist dictatorship.
We’ve been careless in the past. Several times, honestly, because while I think the worst president, the one who’s done the most damage, is this fucking guy we have now, and the second worst was ol’ Ronnie Reagan – I would argue that the third worst, and maybe the most insidious, was Bill Clinton; and without the groundwork that Reagan and Clinton laid, we wouldn’t have had half the problems we have had since the Millennium came. Fascism doesn’t come from nowhere, and it doesn’t come all of a sudden: and I will argue that nearly all of us are complicit, to some small degree, mostly by being careless – I voted for Clinton, mainly because I just didn’t know why I shouldn’t, because I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t know if voting for Bob Dole, in my case in 1996, would have been better: and that’s the issue. I don’t know. I should have known: I should have cared. But instead I was careless, and so I bear some of the shared responsibility for the destruction of the welfare state and the villainization of people receiving assistance, and for the racist attacks on black and brown people through the justice system which labeled them “superpredators,” and for the removal of the Glass-Steagall act, which set up the Great Recession and continued the march towards corporatism we are facing down now. I was careless, and I voted for what was probably the wrong candidate.
But at this moment, there is no doubt about who is the wrong party to support. I hope we all know now that voting for the party of Trump is the most careless, most dangerous thing we can do, other than actually going into the woods, to the middle of the Teddy Bears Picnic, and throwing a Molotov cocktail (January 6th would be the analogous action there, and if you think we’re immune from a new insurrection led by the same fucking guy who led the last one, then you’re being careless, and I have to ask you again: please.).
Let’s assume that the people reading this don’t want to do that. You don’t want to throw Molotovs at the Teddy Bears. You don’t want to burn the whole thing down. Some people do, of course, and whatever else we believe, we have to know that those people are wrong and dangerous. Even if you want to dismantle the system in place, and most of me wants to do that (Some of me is a coward, which on the bright side does make me careful), burning it down is not the right way to achieve reform. The civil war that would result from an actual conflict, and actual conflagration, would be far too destructive, and like any civil war would immediately rage out of control and burn everything, not just the bad things. Firefighters use controlled burns to contain wildfires, but not to stop them from starting: and within the controlled burns, inside the fire perimeter that our firefighters manage to create, everything is likely to be destroyed. We don’t want that to be our country. We really don’t. So we – you – are not going to start throwing kerosene around and then reach for the match.
So what do we do?
I’ve struggled with this for years. For better than a decade now, which obviates my usual excuse – which is not really an excuse, but it is true: I do enough already to support my community and improve my world, and I have more than enough emotional weight to lift and carry with me every day; I don’t have the wherewithal to take on large political activism. I can’t do it. I recognize that is a cop-out, but it’s the truth. I recognize, as well, that I should have done more ten years ago: I should have been more aware of how the DNC fucked up the 2016 election by cheating to remove Bernie Sanders from the ballot in order to push another Clinton presidency. I’m aware now that the DNC is not a trustworthy partner in our current fight, because they serve the same corporate and monied interests that the majority of the Republican party serves; and thus, they are trying to start the same fires the Republicans are, even if they want to hide the fires better and stand well back from the flames to distract us: because the Democrats writ large also profit from the scorched earth; and as part of the earth that would be scorched, I don’t want to let them do that.
But I also realize that, while there are surely Republican candidates who do not want to support Trumpian fascism, the majority of the GOP – the VAST majority – are carrying Tiki torches as they go down to the woods today, and every day. The ones in the red hats are also carrying Molotovs: but the Republicans who vote with Trump every time are not better than the ones in the red hats: they are still setting fires, and not because of carelessness, though carelessness is part of the reason for their actions. Not even the ones who have every reason to be better than the red hats, like Massie and Tillis and Cornyn and Cassidy, but who still fucking vote for Todd Blanche to destroy the rule of law and set fire to the Constitution. The Democrats, maybe only because they desperately want to oppose Trump and win more popularity thereby, will, for the nonce, put out the fires where they can instead of starting them.
What’s important, though, is not what the two parties will do, what the politicians on either side will do. What is important is what we do. What YOU do. And you – we – have to be careful. We have to care.
It’s the same thing here. People – perfectly good and decent people, just people who were being careless – voted for Trump, and for Republicans, in 2024. They were careless because they ignored what Trump had done before, and because they had believed all of the criticism of Joe Biden, and because they were angry at Washington and the way our political system always gives us two bad options, and then makes us choose between them. And people should be angry at that: and we should try to change that. And people are perfectly free to criticize Joe Biden; lord knows I did. More than once. But voting for Trump, no matter what the underlying reason was – fear over immigration, or rising prices, or the escalating wars in the Middle East – was careless; we were all holding a book of matches, and some people struck one and then dropped it, intentionally. Or maybe “hucked it at a Democrat” would be more appropriate, if we imagine the match tailing down, flaring orange, and then landing on a pile of dry leaves. Starting a fire: because of carelessness. Indifference. Ignorance – too much of it willing ignorance.
We can’t be that way any more. And the main point I want to make here, the reason I wrote all this starting with Smokey the Bear, is this: we don’t have to save the world by ourselves – you don’t have to save the world by yourself. All you have to do is your part.
Care. And be careful.
First of all: vote for Democrats. Vote for Independents or third party candidates, if your local Democrat is a firestarter, or a little too close to fascist (Looking at you, Fetterman.). Don’t vote Republican. Again, there are probably exceptions to that, and I won’t try to make it an absolute rule: but generally speaking, there is one side trying to set the country on fire, and one side trying to put it out, and the least we can all do is help try to put the country out. That is the Democratic side. So vote Blue.
More importantly, vote. Show up. The Republican strategy, for a long time, has been to restrict voter access, because their base are the ones who can most easily avoid the roadblocks they can put in place. Therefore the fewer people who vote, the better the Republicans do. Except the way they make that happen is by setting democracy on fire: and in order to keep their power, and now, to extract as much corrupt wealth as possible from the burning building, they have been ready and willing and even eager to set the country ablaze. So don’t help them, not even by being careless. Care. Pay attention. Vote. Talk, when and where you can, about what you see, about what is going on, about where you see embers smoldering, and where the water is. Try to put the little fires out, around you – but only as you can. If we all do just what we can, then that will be enough. Because it isn’t just you.
It’s us. All of us.
And only we can prevent American fascism.
