Thoughts on the California Wildfires

Honestly, I am devastated. Something about fire is holy to me. It has this occult nature to it. Fire is both destructive and life-affirming. It's wild to the core. Attempts to harness it contain a level of danger to this day.

First, the schadenfreude. I feel none. Perhaps I would have, when I was a younger man, more emotional and less calculating when my brain had not fully developed. I have said things in the past along the lines of people cheering the demise of Los Angeles. Many are finding joy in the destruction. I do not blame them. Being from a "flyover state" or the "rust belt," you grow weary of the "coastal elites" mocking you for decades on end with wrong assumptions and goofy stereotypes that never existed (unlike most stereotypes that seem wholly grounded in reality). I won't lecture or denigrate those who feel LA is "getting what it deserves," or experiencing a Godly wrath. However, I feel no such pleasure.

I love California the way I love Boston and New York City. That is entirely and as they are. Sure, there room for improvement, demographically and politically, most notably, but otherwise, I have nothing bad to say. One of the nicest summers of my life was spent in California. I drove the entire length of the Pacific Coast Highway. I could probably write an essay on that alone. For now, all I’d like to share is in that summer, every song I had ever heard about California suddenly made sense in a way that connected the entire universe, with the center of it being somewhere in the middle of the night on the very edge of the coast.

The most common refrain I have seen about the current wildfires is, "This is what they voted for." In a way, that is undoubtedly true, at least for the folks who vote liberal / Democrat. California voted around 40% for Trump in 2024. LA County went 35% for Trump, Riverside 49.6%, and 48.9% for Orange County. Those numbers were surprising to me. California is not as liberal as I thought, and I can safely assume the demographic replacement of California is largely to blame.

Unpacking what people mean when they say, "this is what they voted for," they are saying when you vote for diversity, mass migration, and liberalism, you are voting for dysfunction, incompetency, and decay. I agree. When you vote for a black mayor and end up with a bunch of lesbian fire chiefs, after saying you'd like the public services to have fewer white men, you are saying, maybe unbeknownst, maybe not, that you desire less competency. It is saying you are willing to sacrifice efficacy for a show of tolerance and diversity. I suppose some people might genuinely believe black women and lesbians are every bit as competent as white men, but I would never take their opinion on much of anything seriously.

There are a handful of reasons I disagree with this sentiment; first, I do not believe in democracy. I cannot, in good faith, say people should suffer the consequences of democracy while saying I think it is a horrid form of government. I find democracy terrible because of precisely this situation. It's not that I do not believe people should suffer consequences of their own doing, but I don't think they should have the power to foist those consequences onto others or those who know better.

Secondly, but related, I think saying they deserve it is like giving a kid with Down syndrome a loaded gun and when they eventually shoot themselves or somebody else saying, "Well, he deserved it." I know liberals have agency, but I don't believe it to have any value. I want them governed by better men and not necessarily suffering from their excesses, especially with all the collateral damage they have caused to wildlife, architecture, and people who do not deserve such a terrible fate.

"Natural disasters" have come to be a slight misnomer. Although hurricanes and fires are entirely in the realm of nature, massive manmade, political, and societal elements involved will dictate how severe a disaster will be and what the response and recovery time will look like. Levee failures in New Orleans contributred to the damage of hurricane Katrina. Had floodwalls been in better condition, the potential flooding would have been less of a problem. Infrastructure matters in cases of natural disasters. In California, the competency and capability of the forest services mattered, as did the infrastructure of water systems, fire hydrant functionality, and every other little detail.

If a percent of the fire trucks in a city have flat tires or bad batteries, when 100% of the units need to be in action, the lack of minor routine maintenance becomes deadly and costly. Months can go by with a flat tire or dead battery, and nobody notices or is affected. Still, when there is an emergency, every little detail and bit of preparation suddenly is of great importance again.

California may have spent more money on diversity programs, housing migrants, and other nuisances than on forest management, fire departments, and water management. Ultimately, these are decisions made by public officials, likely those voted into their roles. Elections do have consequences, as do budget changes and public policy decisions. There is some other world (maybe only hypothetically) where competent middle-aged white men with extreme right-wing views govern California. Some of whom were in the forest daily. Others were checking hydrant pressures obsessively; some still were making sure every last piece of equipment on the fleet of fire trucks was maintained as if it were an F1 car or fighter jet. In that other California, wildfires are rare, contained quickly, and the damage is minimal. The expertise and competency go largely unnoticed by the public. To most, "everything just always works," and they naively take that fact as some societal baseline and not the efforts of competent men with high agency who treat their job as a noble effort.

I hope California can recover. I am planning to head out there this year. I had not been until the fires. Now I feel drawn to the West Coast like some sacred journey for reasons I do not yet understand. I’ll find whatever it is out there calling.