Standing up, pushing back against the Trump intrusions

John McPhee can really write

Author’s Note: The original version of this column incorrectly stated Dan Stec and Matt Simpson were present at the event in question. They were present at another, similar event. The earlier version also mentioned Ralph Bartlett, county fire coordinator, but he was not at the event.

Kelly Baker was mad, but she was keeping quiet, because it was a big night for her son.

He and others were being recognized Wednesday night at a graduation banquet for firefighting trainees in Warren County. She and her husband were there with other family members to applaud for the volunteers who would soon be serving their communities as firefighters.

Kelly’s husband is an assistant chief with the Bolton department. Her father and grandfather were local firefighters. Her son started the training course soon after graduating from SUNY Buffalo this summer.

A trainer was running a slide show before dinner at the banquet. But instead of showing trainees, the first image was of Donald Trump — “in some kind of superhero posture on a piece of what I presume to be fire apparatus,” Kelly said. “It said ‘2024’ at the bottom.”

She was fuming at the intrusion into what should have been a politics-free event, but she didn’t want to disrupt the celebration. 

“I assumed I would never have to see that again,” she said.

Then the slideshow ended with the same image on the screen.

Afterward, others tried to normalize and minimize the episode. It was a screensaver on the trainer’s computer, they said. He didn’t mean to include it, and it was only up for a moment.

But Baker said she had time to stand up and speak out while the image was there.

“I said, ‘Take that crap down! This guy is going to jail. How dare you presume to show this to all these people we’re trying to honor.’”

That is what she thinks she said. She isn’t sure of her exact words.

A few people told her to shut up, she said, and she walked out of the room and spent the rest of the banquet outside. Her daughter joined her.

“I upset myself by speaking out, but I’d be more upset if I hadn’t,” she said.

Kelly said her daughter told her some of the firefighters were calling her “a Karen.”

Kelly worked with men for years as a pilot for FedEx and said she became accustomed to the assumption she shared their politics.

She’s retired now and 62.

“I always have a thing that says, this is not going to happen on my watch,” she said.

The excuse offered for the trainer does not wash. Unless he had never run one of these presentations before, he knew the Trump image would be the first and last thing his audience would see.

Political endorsements have no place in firefighter training.

Kelly said she saw state Senator Dan Stec and Assemblyman Matt Simpson at another firefighter event, where speakers were bashing the current presidential administration. I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by suggesting they will speak out about how inappropriate that is. 

The episode may not end here, however. I’m guessing the officials who run the state agencies that handle firefighter training — the Office of Fire Prevention and Control and, above that, the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services — do not support on-the-job politicking.

The broader perspective is to see the way Trump partisans are increasingly shoving their message into places it doesn’t belong. Like the man they follow, they do not feel bound by the rules and manners others do, and they have a purpose — to wear down the opposition before the election even takes place.

It’s up to the rest of us to stand up like Kelly Baker and push back.

Readings

I read “The Control of Nature” by John McPhee, published in 1989. It comprises three long essays — “Atchafalaya,” “Cooling the Lava” and “Los Angeles Against the Mountains” — about places where human beings are waging pitched battles against natural forces. It’s wonderfully entertaining and informative, especially “Cooling the Lava,” which tells the story of an Icelandic village whose livelihood is threatened by a volcano as it sends forth a lava flow that, if allowed to continue unimpeded, will fill the village’s fishing harbor. The battle to cool the lava by pouring on it millions of gallons of sea water a day is epic and astonishing.

All three attempts at “control” are only partially successful. All three will clearly, someday, end in failure. But the ingenuity and determination of the people who are battling back are almost as wondrous to behold as the unstoppable natural forces they’re fighting.

This was the first book I’ve read by McPhee, and perhaps even the first time I’ve read one of his essays, many of which ran in The New Yorker. He’s a bold writer, unafraid to throw in random, entertaining asides or odd analogies, and in this book, his choice of subject couldn’t have been more exciting.

Inter-species interaction

It has taken a few years, but our dog Ringo’s curiosity over Beans, our bunny, is blossoming into a friendship. Early on, we feared for Beans’ safety if Ringo were allowed in the same room, so we keep Beans in his own room, which has a gate with a latch. But Beans squeezed through the gate a few times and survived, and then he began to approach Ringo and bump noses through the bars of the gate. Now, Ringo is allowed in to play occasionally. They both seem to enjoy it.