The Britannia Mountain fire near Wheatland has consumed more than 32,000 acres, 19 structures, and cost over $2.6 million. It is only one of 47,463 wildfires this year that have burned 6,838,826 acres.
And don’t forget the smoke. It makes eyes water and throats burn far away from the fire itself. It obscures the beautiful vistas of Wyoming and is the visible residue of a massive injection of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Everybody has a stake in reducing wildfires. They make an atmosphere that no one wants to breathe but that we all must. No matter how distant from us personally, they affect us all. They waste public resources, threaten wildlife, ruin beautiful vistas and destroy the homes of our neighbors and our public infrastructure while costing billions of tax-dollars.
Western wildfires have striking parallels to cultural wildfires. These are played out in city council meetings and in school board meetings. They rage in court cases and legislative committee hearings, in letters to the editor, in obscure academic journals, and in op-eds.
Our kids encounter the flames from kindergarten classrooms to high school assemblies and university lecture halls. Unless we take the time to ask our children what they are learning we will never notice.
Cultural wildfires threaten to burn down institutions of our shared culture. Marriage, family, church and government are all threatened by the flames. Most have already been scorched.
Some are deliberately set by cultural arsonists. Others are the result of cultural carelessness. Like fires in the wilderness, we oftentimes don’t notice them until they have been burning for a while. There are so many of them that we can hardly keep track of them all.
No one is their master—not even those who started them. Cultural ideas, like fires, have a life of their own. Once let loose, they burn whatever is in their path. All you can do with either to fight or fan the flames.
Public elections ask officials to fight the cultural fires for us. That’s a good start. But there are three things we must never forget.
First, not everyone is wanting to extinguish the flames. Cultural arsonists run for public office just as surely as cultural firefighters do. We must discern the difference.
Second, not everyone who wants to extinguish the flames knows how. Just as some cultural fires are started accidentally, so also elected officials who do not understand the nature of fire may accidentally make matters worse. We should value those who study and train to be effective firefighters.
Third, once we send people in to fight the fires, they still need our support. It would be unconscionable to drop smoke jumpers into a wilderness area and pay no attention to them afterwards. Conditions on the ground are always changing and we must constantly monitor and resupply them.
In the same way, we should be in constant contact with anybody we elect to fight the cultural fires. Without our constant support and resupply, they cannot do the job. Just because you are not on the front lines does not mean you don’t have a stake in fighting the fires.
Cultural fires scorch the land and destroy the beauty of the land. They turn once- wholesome places into toxic wastelands. Just think about how the torching of public obscenity laws has led to an internet that places every son or daughter within a single click of soul-corrupting images. We have isolated parents from any neighborly support in protecting their kids from the noxious fumes of our culture.
We also see families burned by the raging fires. Look at the children from broken homes and you will usually find that our cultural degeneration contributed to the tragedy. The cultural fires make it more difficult for well-meaning parents to protect the integrity of their own homes.
We can and should do something about this. Governments, churches and educational institutions have a direct stake in making every decision in a way that supports the home and family. At the heart of our cultural wars is a false notion that individual freedom trumps the integrity of the family.
The opposite is true. The family is the basic building block of society. Every time there is a choice between strengthening the bonds of the family and absolute individual autonomy, the family must come first.
Finally, don’t forget about the smoke. Even if your own family is preserved from the flames, even if you can keep yourself and your children away from the noxious wastelands created by our cultural fires, never forget that we all still breathe the same air.
It seeps into your home unbidden. It fills your lungs and those of your children. In time, it desensitizes you even to notice that you are breathing noxious fumes. The only way to clean the air that we all breathe, and build a healthy environment for your family, is to join hands in putting out the fires.
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