Trump does not rake; he does not understand raking
Zen priests rake as a form of meditation, a way of harmonizing their lives and the world. A Zen garden is a microcosm of the world: The sand or pebbles a Buddhist rakes symbolize oceans, lakes and rivers, while boulders and stones represent mountains, islands and other elements of nature. Raking is a practice of mindfulness, the daily work necessary for life to have meaning, the “extraordinary ordinary” tasks that everyone should attend to.
Donald Trump does not rake. He does not understand raking. He believes that California would be spared forest fires if only we raked our forests: “I see again the forest fires are starting … again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”
Trump’s knowledge of how to prevent forest fires from spreading is on par with his knowledge of how to prevent viruses from spreading.
More than anything, Trump’s comments show how little and how selectively he reads and listens — and thinks — about everything. With him, a little knowledge is not only dangerous — it can be disastrous, as it has been with COVID-19.
After the Paradise fire in 2018, Trump observed, “You gotta take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important.” He said he had been talking with the president of Finland. There, Trump said, “they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. And they don’t have any problem.”
Sauli Niinistö, the president of Finland, didn’t recall mentioning raking to Trump. According to Rami Ruuska, a forest fires expert at the Finnish Interior Ministry who was cited by The New York Times, raking for leaves and needles is not a normal feature of Finnish fire prevention. Instead, Finns focus on use of heavy machinery to remove dead trees from the forest floor.
Such measures, plus controlled burns, keep the forest biomass low and the forests healthy and less vulnerable to fires, which is possible when you are a country that is about 4% of the size of the United States, with forests less than 7% of those in the United States, and with a much colder, wetter climate than California.
Trump’s criticism of California’s most recent and still ongoing fires makes no mention of their being ignited by lightning storms that over a two-week period included nearly 14,000 strikes, setting off more than 840 wildfires that burned over 1.4 million acres.
Trump does not meditate.
He shows no sign of having ever practiced mindfulness. In fact, his life is just the opposite — filled with noise, deception, falsehoods, show and shiny objects that distract his and others’ minds.
Trump’s response to the fires, as in all things, is focused on himself, not on the suffering and death of people and animals, not on the enormous loss of property and natural resources. According to Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, Trump ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to stop relief funds for the 2018 Paradise fire (which Trump mistakenly called the “Pleasure Fire”) because of his pique over Californians not voting for him. Just last month, he threatened to withhold relief funds for the current fire disaster, only to relent a few days later.
If Trump knew how to rake, his world wouldn’t be on fire. Neither would ours.