In the Maui Wildfires, Wokeness Kills
NEVER put the woke in charge of ANYTHING.
I thought I had seen everything when it comes to the utter destruction the woke can bring about. Then I saw this:
With wildfires ripping across West Maui on Aug. 8, a state water official delayed the release of water that landowners requested to help protect their property from damage and stop the spread. The water standoff played out over much of the day and the water didn’t come until too late….
According to accounts of four people with knowledge of the situation, M. Kaleo Manuel, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and DLNR’s deputy director for water resource management, initially refused West Maui Land Co.’s requests for additional water to help prevent fires from spreading to properties managed by the company. Manuel eventually released water but not until after the fire had run its course.
Denying water needed to suppress a dangerous wildfire?? Why? Why such soulless, brainless, heartless willful negligence?
Well, Manuel is quite woke and is very much into applying his wokeness, sprinkled with environmental paganism, to water management, even if it means letting a wildfire heading towards a town burn out of control apparently. “True conversations about equity” are more important. I think quick conversations and actions are more important when a wildfire is blazing, but I’m not woke. And precious, precious water must be protected not used . . . even if the town of Lahaina needs protection from a fast spreading wildfire — or what was the town of Lahaina.
Yes, protecting a farmer is one excuse given for the delay. I’m not buying that.
At this point a reader might think this is just one-off gross negligence that has nothing to do with wokeness. Which begs the question, how many examples of destruction by wokeness do you want?
Take San Francisco and their homeless situation…
…please. The city has pumped billions into addressing homelessness, over $3 billion since 2016. Yet the situation there has only gotten worse, much worse. Why?
A big reason is because San Francisco provides housing to homeless, “permanent supportive housing” (PSH), without requiring drug rehab or even participation in job programs. So guess what? Lazy street drug addicts from all over the place are flocking to San Francisco. Give those vagrants credit. They are smarter than the City of San Francisco. Oh, and if a homeless person is even smarter and wants help getting off drugs? He might lose his PSH then. I’m not kidding:
…Having a ‘disability’ is one of three eligibility requirements for PSH,… but this disability need not be related to mobility, learning, or ability to communicate — it can also be “a physical, mental, or emotional impairment, including an impairment caused by alcohol or drug abuse that... is expected to be long-continuing or of indefinite duration [and] substantially impedes the individual’s ability to live independently.” Tenants can lose their units if “the adult household member with a qualifying disability… no longer [resides] in the unit, and there is not a certified qualifying disability among any other adults in the household.” In other words, if a person cites addiction as their disability when applying for PSH, then they risk losing their unit if they manage to get clean.
You get what you reward. And San Francisco has spent billions to reward self-destructive anti-social behaviors and even provide disincentives to getting off drugs and getting one’s act together.
And if you think this has nothing to do with wokeness, think again:
In keeping with the 130-page equity action plan that the HSH submitted in early 2021 to San Francisco’s Office of Racial Equity (inaugurated in 2019 by executive order of Mayor Breed as a sub-department of the city’s Commission on Human Rights, which received over $15 million in funding last year), the new five-year plan cites “advancing racial equity and housing justice” as the “leading focus within our community’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness.” To this end, it will provide “infrastructure and sustainability supports… to more BIPOC-led organizations and organizations deeply rooted in historically marginalized neighborhoods and communities” while “specifically focusing on supporting the capacity-building efforts of Black-led organizations.” Provisions are also included to “design, launch, and implement the Ending Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming (TGNC) Homelessness Initiative,” which involves dedicating 150 PSH subsidies to “transgender and gender non-conforming households.”
And all that is not to mention the massive crime in San Francisco and other blue cities that followed woke policies of being hard on police and hard on those who defend themselves and their property and easy on criminals. Most criminals are smarter than the woke, too. The more crime they can commit and get away with, the better. And woke San Francisco excels in that regard, although other blue cities are not far behind.
The sad irony is these woke policies are hardest on those the woke claims to advocate for. When cities become woke crime ridden hellholes with drug needles and feces all over the sidewalks, the wealthy, most of whom voted for woke Democrats responsible for ruining these cities, can easily flee. The working poor cannot.
In some cities, it is getting harder for the poor to buy food and other necessities as stores close because of the shoplifting industry. But woke posturing is more important than actually helping the poor, don’tcha know.
Do I have to say more? Is the main lesson from all this mad self-inflicted ruin not obvious already? I’ll say it anyway.
NEVER put the woke in charge of ANYTHING. Wokeness ruins! Wokeness destroys!
And in the sad, infuriating case of withholding water from the Maui wildfires, wokeness kills.