Three firefighters are dead. Let that sink in. Three men who ran towards the inferno while the rest of us scroll through our feeds, debating the merits of oat milk versus almond milk.
The Colorado-Utah wildfire, a beast of our own making, has claimed lives, and the nation yawns. We are living in the autumn of a civilisation that has lost its nerve. The fall of Rome was not a single cataclysm; it was a thousand small abandonments of duty, a slow rot masked by comfort.
Today, we see the same rot. When fire crews are underfunded, when climate change is a partisan litmus test rather than a technical problem, when we treat tragedy as content to be consumed and discarded, we are not merely failing the dead. We are failing the very idea of a republic.
The Victorians, for all their hypocrisy, understood sacrifice. They built monuments to the fallen, not just to mourn but to remind the living what was owed. We build nothing but memes.
The firefighters who perished were not statistics. They were sons, brothers, probably patriots in a country that no longer knows what patriotism means beyond flag-waving and grievance. Their deaths are a mirror.
Look into it. Do you see a nation worthy of their sacrifice? Or do you see a people too distracted by their own petty comforts to honour the contract of citizenship?
The flames will not be quenched by hashtags or hot takes. They will only be quenched by a collective will we seem to have misplaced, somewhere between the last election and the next outrage.
