I Sing the Song of My People

While standing in awe of tire fires

Source

My people.
Bible people.
Miracle Mile people.
My people.

Miracle inbound.
Not what you’d expect?
Sorry to disappoint you.
Blame God.

Wonders surround us…
harrowing,
heinous,
horrendous.

Wonders, just the same.

I sing the song of my people.
No fluff bunnies here.
Narrative networks depend
on causal sequences.

Sequencing in time.

Time is money.
Our leaders tell us so.
God gets really pissed off
so He unleashes
The Ten Plagues…

…in sequence…

Blood
Frogs
Lice
Flies
Murrain
Boils
Hail
Locusts
Darkness
Death of the firstborn

Act of God.

Curtain call.

What a wonder, to witness these times!

There’s a reason that the Springfield tire fire is a recurring joke on The Simpsons: it embodies this idea of poor foresight and planning, of trying to accomplish something without really thinking through all the consequences.

There’s often an aspect of not caring about bystanders or future parties a tire fire’s noxious fumes will affect, to say nothing of the fact that those fumes are guaranteed to be horrible. (The contents of a dumpster fire’s fumes are randomish, but generally less likely to be as horrible.)

But there’s a key component of a tire fire that distinguishes itself from a dumpster fire, and it’s the most relevant when we use it to describe technology: tire fires are not byproduct of “normal operations.”

A conscious decision must be made to not only collect, but build that pile of tires. We had to light it ablaze. And unlike dumpster fires, tire fires burn much longer. They’re extremely difficult to extinguish once they’re started, if we even bother to try extinguishing them.

In fact, perhaps that is the most important aspect of the analogy: tire fires can burn slowly for weeks (or even decades!) Because of this, we might be fine piling up all of our tires, but as they burn below the surface, we don’t react to put the fire out, because we don’t even see it until it’s too late.

That’s why the joke on the Simpsons is a mainstay: the Springfield tire fire has gotten so out of control, the community just shrugs, moves on, and mostly-ignores it, accepting that’s what they built and putting it out is just too difficult now.

Interestingly, these effects are all known. We intuitively know tire fires are bad. Really bad. And yet some set of circumstances, somewhere prompted the conclusion that building and stoking one one was a better course of action than… well… not.