Parable of the House on Fire ~ By Peta-de-Aztlan

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Once upon a time, in the land of Aztlan in a village called Sacra, there lived an energetic young Chicano named Beto who lived in a small house with his dog Pedro. His village duty was to keep an eye out for any fires in the village, as no reliable fire patrol was nearby in his barrio.

On his front porch, Beto kept big barrels of water and stacks of buckets to fight fires. Whenever he spotted smoke in the sky or smelled fire he would check it out and his dog Pedro would start barking crazy. If Beto spied a fire up the street or across the street he would issue a Sacra Village Fire Alert via Emails from his Internet-computer out to his Fire Alert Yahoo Group Members, who were usually super-glued to their Internet computers at home and were volunteer fire fighters. Then, his group, along with other local villagers, would rush up to his front porch, fill up their water buckets from the water barrels and they would unite to put the fire out!

One dry hot day, while he was in his living room on the Internet, his dog Pedro ran up to him barking crazy. He got up and went outside. There was a fire in a house right across the street from his ‘casa’. From his front porch he saw flames leaping up high into the sky. He rushed into his house, hopped on his computer and issued a Sacra Village Fire Alert.

His Group Members and others came out in the streets, rushed to his front porch, and they all grabbed water buckets from the water barrels and carted them across the street in a line to the house on fire again and again. Finally, after a few hours of fire fighting the fire was put out, but the house was destroyed!

The small family who lived in the house was not home at the time as they had been together at a Peace Demonstration downtown. So when they got home and saw their house had been burnt down they were sad, but they were able to stay with Beto’s Tia Concha for a spell.

After his crew had put out the fire across the street, some of them hanged around on Beto’s front porch, drank some café, smoked, talked about the fire and rested up. It had been a hard fire to put out and they had used up all their water from the barrels. They talked about the need to roll the barrels to the nearby Sacra River later on to fill them back up with water for the fire next time. So they figured they could wait until ‘manana’!

So Beto sat back on his front porch chair, smoking a Camel, then, Pedro started barking like crazy again and his big nose smelled paper burning in the air. He looked around, stepped halfway into the street and saw gray smoke curling up in the sky from his own backyard!

He ran around back with Pedro trailing right behind him. He saw a pile of old dry recycled newspapers was on fire by his back door. He got most of his news from the Internet so he just collected old newspapers for extra cash. He quickly took off his favorite jacket and smacked the burning pile to put out the fire. His jacket was ruined, but the fire was out and his house was safe.

Thus, Beto learned that though it is good to help his neighbors with any fires it was important to make sure he had extra barrels of water in his backyard to put out any fire in his own backyard in order to be better prepared for the fire next time!
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http://liberation-now.blogspot.com/2006/11/parable-of-house-on-fire-by-peta-de.html
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11-03-06