A few days ago I was talking with a friend who runs a large family foundation. They support a lot of causes but I was curious what motivated them to give to one organization over another. With all the good groups out there, and all the need in the world, how did they decide?
He used a phrase we’ve all heard often when he answered, “We love to pour gas on the fire when we see something is really working.”
Now this wasn’t an especially unique comment. I’ve heard it many times before. For that matter, I’ve said it many times before.
But he happened to say it just a day after I had been chuckling about a story from my early teen years when our family first moved out of suburbia and to a small cattle ranch.
We were too remote for regular garbage service, so we often burned it in large 55 gallon steel drums. I had watched both of my parents start these fires and, being thirteen years old, thought it looked easy. Just pour some gas along the inside walls of the steel drum so it dripped to the bottom, sprinkle a bit on the top, and ignite it with a match.
Simple.
One foggy morning was the first time I was given the job of burning the garbage. “Just light a match to it, Roy, but be careful.”
Excited to do this, I ran over to the drum and noticed the garbage was damp from the heavy fog. Having seen what my folks did, I poured a little gas along the edges, sprinkled some on top, and then poured or sprinkled a bit more because I knew it would take a little extra to get the damp garbage burning. Then I struck a match and flipped it into the drum.
The explosion was so low key sounding — more of a HARRUMPHHHH sound than a boom — that I didn’t understand what had happened at first. And then the garbage started falling on me. On everything, actually. That’s when I realized that the gasoline had exploded and shot flaming chunks of garbage into the air like the steel drum was some sort of medieval mortar.
I ran, of course, and neither I or anything else was seriously harmed. Though I did work frantically to put out a few small fires, and then spent an hour picking up the garbage.
What happened? Well, as it turned out that “damp” garbage was already soaked in gasoline. My parents had prepared the barrel and I was just to light a match. Not understanding (or listening to) their instructions, I had added even more gas, probably 2-3x what was needed. My parents had told me “just light a match to it” but what I had heard was “dump enormous amounts of gasoline into the drum until you are sure every single bit of trash is saturated and then a bit more because it’s damp and then light a match.”
It was a thirteen year old mind at work, so what can I say?
Anyway, when my friend in philanthropy said they loved to put gasoline on the fire, I remembered what happened when we put too much gasoline onto something before there was a fire.
He’s right of course — it’s great to feed the growth of something that has proven to work.
But before there is a fire we should probably practice a more disciplined approach. Don’t create so much fuel that ignition causes an explosion instead of a fire. That’s a lesson for another day.
Image by David Mark from Pixabay