DEI and You. 

 “Dead flies putrefy the perfumer's ointment, And cause it to give off a foul odour”

                                                                                Ecclesiastes 10:1 NKJV

What does a fly in the ointment have to do with anything? This article will be about the LA fires. The conditions and circumstances which contributed to it and the results.

I’m sure by now if you follow the news remotely, you know about the LA fires. I’m going to look closely at the problem, which precipitated the cause of the fire. That is DEI, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  The problem which led to the conditions and circumstances of the fires is the focus and preoccupation with DEI initiatives. The goals of DEI may seem nice to some, but they aim at the heart of meritocracy. They do not consider the job's actual requirements and may not seek to cause chaos or harm, but they do most effectively. I find it interesting that the Fire Chief and her few deputies are lesbian. This is obviously the result of the Chief wanting to have people around her who affirm her biases and judgement, which is what DEI purported to correct, and of course, it does not. It merely amplifies faulty values, values which have no place in the workplace. There is no contradictory position or cause heard among her senior staff who reflect a different set of values or goals. The other part of this issue is that it’s surprising to me how little DEI needs to be considered before it causes failure in the entire system. Three lesbians at the top of the chain and the entire system collapses. The lack of effectiveness, capability, and redundancy or available backup causes the system to collapse. The failure to provide water promptly and accurately on target and the entire system loses. Now, I understand that budgeting matters and that there were decisions made that weren’t the purview of the Fire Chief, but obviously, the Fire Chief was not able to communicate her needs and have them reflected in the city’s budget tells me that either the system is broken or harmed in some manner. The mayor thought that a fire wouldn’t break out and no one would know, but we all know now.

So, what? What can we do about it? Well, for one, we can learn why this is dangerous and broken. We can prevent these behaviours from being present in our communities. We can ensure that training standards are clear and universal as much as is feasible. When training standards are reduced for a segment of the population, we can be sure that some degree of failure will eventually happen, and we make sure that we are witnesses to it. Any reduction in merit ruins whatever it touches, we can be assured of that. It would be nice, perhaps, if it wasn’t so, but it is so. It is definitely and always so.

I hope that everyone will learn this lesson. I hope that this won’t happen again, but I believe it will happen again, and again more severely. Why? Because as people we want to believe what we believe, and we want to have our values reflected in the world around us. The only questions are whether or not our values are reflected around us and whether they contribute positively to taking action and correcting the faults we work to correct, whatever that might be. In LA, those values did not.