We see the might of the
fire department when it tries to contain enormous wildfires, and we
know that this fire department could replace the police and the army
in places that are susceptible to fires. The fire department's
up-to-date technology, such as the latest cutting-edge chemicals to
tackle the blaze, and its highly skilled manpower consisting even of
airplane pilots, enable it to manage large swathes of land and large
numbers of population, making it very powerful, sometimes literally
overnight. But this power is dependent on the whims of the fire.
The sustenance of power
in the fire department depends fully on the duration of the blaze: if
the blaze lasts for days, the fire department is powerful for those
days, and if it lasts for weeks then the fire department is powerful
for weeks. After the wildfire is extinguished, the fire department
dramatically loses power and once again goes back into oblivion. Its
oblivion and inactivity is complete, for the fire department maintains no internal
“office politics” because its experience of power is intense,
short-lived and accompanies the fire, as opposed to being the result
of careful and farsighted political planning, team-building and
manipulation.
Today's intense and
panicked focus in the media on the wildfires of Canada and the USA
are not so just because the fires have been particularly intense and
active, but because of the anxiety that the longer the fires last the
longer the fire department stays in power, and gets the chance to
further strengthen its role in a certain place and in wider society,
toppling even the police and army from certain places, for one.
The fire department
dictates the flows of people out of dangerous places and
evaluates when the population's private property has to be left
behind. Giving the painful instruction to leave behind one's home and other
belongings which cannot be taken along is made far easier by the
philosophies declaring the impermanence of things. It is this idea in
philosophy of impermanence which can be carried forward, thought over and espoused by
the fire department more than by other organizations. It is this
philosophy with which the fire department is engaged in while doing its
“office work,” when the firefighters directly face the blaze, as
opposed to being politicized thoroughly like the police and the army
and thinking of the tactics and strategies to gain more political
power for a certain team or leader within the department, even when they
are supposed to be completely engaged in on-the-ground operations.
Politics is of no interest to the firefighter, politics ultimately
being the search and problematization of the “other” of a certain
society, which the firefighter is not concerned with, given that
his/her “enemy” is the natural fire itself and not the foreign or
criminal “other.”
However, there is a
political-philosophical problem in the fire department when it
engages in the Greek philosophers/thinkers who consider fire to be
one of the important four or five elements which compose the
universe, and influenced by the ancient Greeks the firefighter celebrates the importance of fire and
becomes a supporter of fires, and considers fire to be his/her leader
and indirectly lends support to the sustenance of the fire
department's power through his/her desire to see the fires burn for as long as possible. He/she ceases
to fight the blaze, and builds all kinds of protests in the
department in order to ultimately support his/her budding revering of
fire. We must continue to reward the firefighters as enduring heroes and
heroines of society for their role in dousing fires even long after they doused the blaze, which may convince them to abandon Greek philosophy's emphasis
on and exaltation of fire.