Here’s another thing that absolutely grinds my gears about this whole situation.
A lot of leftist, progressive, and left-leaning commentators I’ve listened to—people I would normally expect to take worker safety seriously—have been weirdly glib about these arsons.
Some are treating it like a joke.
Some refuse to condemn it.
Some are sympathizing with the arsonist more than the people who could have been harmed.
Some are dancing around it with irony, sarcasm, or “well, what do you expect?” type commentary.
And honestly?
At this point, yeah—they lost me on this one.
Sorry.
Because there are moments where ambiguity stops being thoughtful and just becomes cowardice. There are moments where trying to sound edgy or clever becomes a substitute for saying the obvious.
And the obvious thing here is simple:
This shit is not a joke.
People could have died.
Workers could have died.
That should be enough right there.
I don’t care if reports say people were evacuated. I don’t care if no one was injured this time. That does not magically make the act acceptable or harmless.
Because here’s the thing people keep refusing to grapple with:
What if they weren’t evacuated in time?
What if someone got trapped?
What if smoke spread faster than expected?
What if the fire reached the area people were evacuated to?
What if emergency exits were blocked?
What if someone panicked and got hurt trying to escape?
That’s how real-world danger works. It’s not clean. It’s not predictable. It’s not something you can retroactively sanitize because the worst-case scenario happened to be avoided this time.
When you start a fire at a workplace—whether it’s a warehouse tied to Amazon or any other company—you create a situation where innocent people are suddenly dependent on luck, timing, alarms, and emergency response.
That alone should be unacceptable.
And what really frustrates me is how some people who claim to care deeply about workers seem to forget workers the second the story becomes politically aestheticized.
They’ll speak passionately—and often correctly—about corporations cutting corners on safety. They’ll condemn dangerous working conditions. They’ll call out greed, negligence, and exploitation.
Good.
They should.
But if you care about worker safety when corporations put workers at risk, then you should also care when individuals put workers at risk.
That should be a no-brainer.
Safety doesn’t stop mattering based on who caused the danger.
Workers don’t become expendable because the person endangering them claims anti-corporate motives.
Risk is risk.
Fire is fire.
Lives are lives.
And that’s why the glibness is so off-putting.
Because it signals that some people care more about the symbolism of the act than the actual human beings caught in the blast radius of it.
That’s backwards.
If you’re truly pro-worker, then workers should remain the center of the conversation at all times—not disappear the moment the story can be framed as resistance.
And if others won’t say that clearly, then yeah—I’ll say it.
Condemn the arson.
Condemn putting workers in danger.
Condemn treating serious threats to human life like edgy content for social media reactions.
Because none of this should be difficult.
It should be common sense.