It's 6:30am, Saturday, November 10. The winds have died
down in Woodland Hills, and the "Woolsey" fire, attacking now in Calabasas to our immediate north, has slowed, so at present we don't have to
evacuate. That could change later in the day. The cold air smells nice, like a wood fire (last night the Santa Ana winds blew the smoke out to sea), but the meaning of the smell is
dire. The gym at my school down the street is filled with refugees.
At the Ralph's, displaced newcomers look for alternatives to Red Cross pizza.
The news media is correct that this fire is unlike any other Southern California fire we've experienced, partly because of its breadth and ferocity, and partly because of two other things: its timing after a mass shooting near its origin and its proximity to a midterm election that left the U.S. in crisis.
I found a strange perspective and further meaning to the fires in a local news report. A man from Camarillo whose house burned down told a reporter, "I still count myself lucky- I didn't have to go through what they did in Thousand Oaks." He was referring to the shooting, in which a crazed man with an assault weapon- which he finally used on himself- killed 12 people at a music club.
Right after the shooting, within a few miles of it, the fire started. The man with the destroyed house had combined, in his mind, the two catastrophes, so that the shooting in Thousand Oaks and the fires were parts of one attack that struck differently in different places. After the man spoke in the clip, the news anchor remarked, "Yes, the people of Thousand Oaks experienced the shooting right before this fire erupted around them," understanding what the homeowner had said. In her mind, too, the shooting and the fires were connected, even as one story.
A BBC reporter who had covered other mass shootings in the U.S. had this observation about Thousand Oaks: "The chilling difference I'm finding here is that, unlike in past shootings, there is no sense of surprise. It's as if people feel, 'Yes, this is what happens.'"
The resignation and despair plus the blending of the shooting and the fires- and perhaps the sense of uncertainty after the midterm- have induced, I think, an "act of God" feel to the catastrophes, invoking in some, perhaps, a Biblical guilt: What have I done to deserve this?, and in others a guilt infused with assertiveness and anger: Why have I allowed myself, my family and friends to accept a society that has no power over itself, that cannot control weapons or crazy people or much of anything?
President Trump this morning threw more anxiety into the mix when he insulted hundreds of thousands of distressed Californians by stating that the Woolsey fire and the Camp fire (in Northern California, with over 1,000 dead) were caused by the state's "gross mismanagement," and that the penalty for this should be "No more Fed payments!," an abusive statement reflecting his anger that California refuses to knuckle under to him.
Yet I counsel against putting much energy into anger at Trump, because it won't do any good. He thrives on it.
Instead, let's take our anger and guilt and direct them at a vacuum, the vacuum where a political party should be. Democrats and Republicans are done. They are phantoms floating past the carnage in California, using outrage at each other to mask their ineffectiveness. We need a new political party, and we need it by 2020. We should put our anger and/or guilt into that.
