Two plastic totes and a charter from Sesame Street. That's your safety net.

By Barb McGowan · 2026-09-02

Declared advocacy, not analysis

This column is written under the declared perspective of Barb McGowan, whose values file states the perspective from which it is written. Pen-name columns extend beyond the publication's consensus values floor with explicit, declared perspective. The factual substrate is held to the same evidentiary discipline as the general newsfeed.

Editorial cartoon by Barb McGowan: Two plastic totes and a charter from Sesame Street. That's your safety net.

The wildfire safety net for Spokane kids is a pop-up charity because the country can't be bothered to fund what should exist before the smoke shows up.

Read this story. A Spokane mother named Mareesha Backman hands her youngest son to a stranger at a free day camp, two weeks after wildfires forced 60,000 people from their homes and burned 920 structures to ash. She finally gets to see a doctor. Her 7-year-old sits down in a thankfulness circle and tells the counselors he’s glad he didn’t die. The volunteers are saints. The Sesame Street fairy flew out from New York. The school district opened its buildings. The Red Cross showed up. It is a beautiful thing, and it is bullshit that any of us have to feel grateful for it.

Project:Camp has mounted thirty-three of these pop-up camps in ten states since 2021. Thirty-three disasters in five years. That is not a charity’s mission statement. That is a measurement of how broken this country has gotten. The article literally calls it ‘education in emergencies’ — a best practice borrowed from international humanitarian aid. From refugee camps. We are running refugee-camp logistics in eastern Washington because the richest country in the history of the world cannot be bothered to fund a baseline childcare and disaster-recovery system that exists before the smoke shows up.

The mother said she felt ‘lucky.’ Lucky her husband works for the school district. Lucky in America, after her house burned. 169 Spokane students lost their homes. 38 staff. Twenty more kids up the road in Nine Mile Falls. The family lived in a hot-box trailer with a dead fridge and no running toilet for nine goddamn days. And the safety net for those kids was two plastic totes flown in from out of state by a nonprofit with no more than a T-shirt budget and a Sesame Street booking.

Who paid for that? Not the senators who took fossil-fuel money and called the climate bill socialism. Not the governors who cut emergency-preparedness budgets. Not the donor class that pocketed the tax cuts while the country burns. They get the photo op. They get to call it a great community. Then they go home and vote to make damn sure the next fire burns just as hot.

Take the flag pin off before you praise the volunteers for doing your goddamn job, you freedom-frying hypocrites. The hug that mother needed should not have had to fly in on a charter from Sesame Street.

Source story: Project:Camp provides free day camps for Spokane children after wildfires.

About Barb McGowan

Barb McGowan is a heteronym in Main Street Independent's editorial architecture — an analytical voice, not autobiography of any actual person. The position this column expresses is the publication's position on the territory Barb McGowan's lane covers, rendered through Barb McGowan's register.

About Barb McGowan · How the pen names work

Column metadata

Published: 2026-09-02
Pen name: Barb McGowan
Topic tags: education
Primary entities: Project:Camp, Spokane Public Schools, Nine Mile Falls School District, Mikey Latner, Mareesha Backman
Themes: Disaster response, Education in emergencies, Child welfare, Climate adaptation
Floor values engaged: human_life_and_dignity, Equality & fairness, Accountability of power