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Your Friendly, Neighborhood Racist Firefighters
Small town news used to be small time news. A cat stuck in a tree. A car rolled through a stop-sign and the driver was sighted, and cited. This ho-hum borough council meeting induced more yawns than it did votes, and that local library held a bake sale.
These days, though, in the populist post-Trump presidency America, local news is an essential bellwether that must be watched carefully. Suddenly, a few ultra-conservative schmucks on a school board is sufficient to tamp down on progressive pedagogical practices, forcing dedicated educators to watch their backs. These days, in a land where faux-moralistic, gun-loving right-wingers are lustily jockeying for position to throw ribald red meat at insurrectionists-to-be, what’s happening in your local firehouse is as important as what’s happening during stump speeches in New Hampshire and Iowa.
And just… what IS happening inside your local firehouse? Chances are, you don’t know, and you wouldn’t want to know; but you definitely should.
Since the brutal and masochistic murder of George Floyd, much of the nation’s attention, rightfully so, has been on police departments and identifying and exposing systemic racism that plagues these paramilitary institutions. Efforts to take the police out of the psychiatric emergency response system are also laudable and are taking…