In the precipice of Trump taking over our federal government everything is burning. After years of scientists telling us this would happen, it has. Much of the Palisades is gone. Malibu is gone, including a house I lived in some years ago with my family. It was a house we celebrated birthdays and holidays. Those neighbors who we still keep in touch with are homeless. It is surreal and heartbreaking.
But we in Santa Monica, as I write this, (air quality withstanding) are safe. Our fire department continues to hold the line, garrisoning on the edges of our city to protect our homes and families. Our police department continues to patrol the evacuated neighborhoods, ensuring our community’s homes are there waiting intact for when we can return.
And for this, a huge and heartfelt THANK YOU to our community’s first responders and everyday municipal workers who have kept us safe during this tragic moment.
For all of our policy differences, for all of the arguments over waste and misused funds, and what direction we should move in, we are fundamentally prepared and our community in this dire moment has benefited. So many of the ills we face as a city come from our borders with Los Angeles or from greater policy decisions made in Sacramento and Washington.
Their problems become our problems and over and over again we must weigh how we may mitigate issues in order of magnitude much greater than we can hope to solve. We must do this without losing our own resources and more fundamentally our identity.
Of course, we also benefit from our proximity, but the point stands and I am thankful for our city’s human infrastructure and it’s very competent handling of this unprecedented emergency.
We insulate and protect our identity—our way of life, living surrounded by LA, inside of California and the US, our differences in ideology and vision, through our own self-management. Our policy decisions and commitment to strong institutions.
We, as I have pointed out before are; deliberative and ecologically conscious, educated and morally generous, wealthy and socialist leaning—all sometimes to a fault. And we will continue to be this way in the face of what is quickly coming upon us. We will continue to insulate ourselves as much as is possible through our municipal management and the protective bubble it forms.
And will this bubble hold in the face of the almost assured awfulness that is on our horizon? Can our policy makers hold the line as our first responders so valiantly have? Only time will tell. But there is comfort in our strength in the face of what is, at least personally a terrifying four or more years ahead of us.
The political wildfire collides with an actual wildfire…
There is something else to remember about wildfires. In the aftermath of the horror and personal loss, there is an immense opportunity for positive change. I cannot speak to what Malibu or the Palisades (or Altadena for that matter) will look in the following years. But I can speak to an America that is increasingly not livable or sustainable.
Whether Trump brings fascism or just incompetent destruction, there will be an aftermath, a rebuilding. So, much as we survive as a city, we will hope to take an outsized role in that rebuilding and beyond that we hope that there is a return to some of the principals of American welfare that ushered in a mostly prosperous second half to the 20th century.
Maybe we as a country can rebuild deliberatively and with ecologically consciousness. With support of education and moral generosity, with tolerance for our many differences that make us the strong people we are, expending our wealthy country’s resources with a kind of socialist leaning that takes care of everyone from our mentally ill homeless to our growing children—that offers jobs with livable wages and human benefits for a healthy society.
Maybe the coming wildfire offers us an opportunity. But like the current state of affairs, there will likely be pain and loss before the rebuilding can begin, so we must as a city and as a community continue to support each other and insulate ourselves from the dangers we cannot control. We must honor and strengthen the bubble that has so far held us intact.
So as our national identity progressively disintegrates over the impending years, we must stay strong. When the societal fires have finally stopped burning there will be an opportunity to rebuild. It will be in the face of a new technologically different paradigm and we as a city will be positioned to take an active role.
I am scared but hopeful. I am grateful to our whole community and feel immensely blessed that we have built a society that offers us strength in difficult times.
Take care everyone. We are in this together.
Miles Warner
