This year of 2025 has started off with levels of difficulty I don’t think any of us could have imagined. Just a few days into the year and a large portion of the city I was born and raised in was razed by fires, either set by man or nature…we still don’t fully know. What I do know is, that while I watched my old hometown burn, I was met with an onslaught of posts, comments, and memes that made me question if we are losing our humanity.
Watching Los Angeles burn in the ways it did over the last week threw me straight back into the depths of Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust. It was surreal, heart wrenching, and my brain kept telling me that what I was seeing was impossible. You see, when you grow up in Southern California, fires are expected. Brush burns, nature does what it does, and our heroic firefighters rush in to do what they do best. It’s part of the cycle of life in SoCal…..but this was very different.
This time, the fire and embers found themselves caught in a wild choreography with gale force Santa Ana winds and innumerable people lost their homes, jobs, and lives overnight. Pets who were left at home while their families went to work and school died afraid and alone when their owners weren’t allowed back to rescue them due to evacuation orders. Residents found themselves forced to leave everything behind, with a lucky few having time to pack one bag, while fleeing for their lives. Wildlife perished in droves, and I had that hollow helpless feeling of watching a disaster hit from the safety of my home across state lines.
Santa Monica is where I was born and spent my life until I turned 18 and went to college. I returned years later with two small children and spent over a decade watching them grow and make friends just a few miles away from my birthplace. Beach weekends, play dates at the parks, field trips, school graduations, hikes….all of it…my childhood memories and theirs intermingled. When the fires started overtaking the city we all collectively held our breath at home. Although we were now living miles away, large pieces of our hearts were still in California with our family and friends who were living in fear for their lives and surrounded by destruction. Every sound they would hear, every text message, every news alert throwing them into anxiety and a week’s worth of panic induced insomnia. It was terrible for them, and the effects will be long lasting.
I checked in constantly on my aunt and uncle who live closest to where the Palisades fires were raging, with 0% containment, for days. When my aunt told me that the school where she’d been teaching for over three decades had been affected, my heart shattered for her. Her school and classroom have always been a second home to her, a place where she has poured her heart and soul for years and where she has found solace throughout life’s more difficult times. So much more than a workplace. For days we thought that the school had been completely lost until a parent was able to walk the grounds and sent her a video of the building her classroom was in which miraculously was left untouched….as if the fire had reached right up to the perimeter and then, somehow, stopped. I still get head-to-toe goosebumps when I rewatch that video….and if I didn’t already believe in something greater than myself, let me tell you that this has made me want to take a much deeper dive into my faith than ever before…..but that, my friends, is a story for another day.
I am lucky and grateful that my family and friends are safe….but I am not blind to the fact that so many other families can’t say the same. That instead of typing away on their computers in a warm home like I am right now, they are displaced and wondering what to do next, where to go, and how they’ll move forward. You see, a lot of people have a gross misconception of who Los Angelenos are. I have heard and heard and overheard the comments regarding how LA deserves to burn, that all the rich people don’t matter, that the celebrities can afford to buy new homes or have multiple other homes to go to.
First of all, I don’t care if you’re a billionaire or a pauper….no one deserves to feel the grief and devastation of losing what they love and have worked hard for. Secondly, LA is a city full of hardworking people who are barely scraping by as it is, who just want to keep their families fed, clothed, and housed. Very few of my friends and family in the city own their own homes, and most live paycheck to paycheck. Yes, there are many wealthy people in the City of Angels, but the lifeblood of that city consists of “the rest of us”.
I also noticed that almost immediately after reports were surfacing of the fire, and the chaos it was leaving in its wake, people took to social media to spout even more hatred and intolerance with comments, posts, and memes regarding how we deserve this because “look what we’re allowing in Ga___ and Ukr___”. I find myself once again asking where humanity has gone?
Since when do we think it’s acceptable to compare tragedies and deem one life more worthy than another? We are aware that, throughout history, there have been terrible injustices, wars have broken out, natural disasters have decimated entire communities, terrible things have happened (and will continue, unfortunately, to do so). Each of those events deserve our grace…not our comparisons. Suffering is suffering. We all bleed red. We all grieve. We all know pain and loss.
The comparisons and judgements made must stop. People need to learn to be truly empathetic and stop with the constant division and intolerance of the pain of others. Just because suffering is occurring in your own backyard DOES NOT make it mean any less than it does on other continents….and maybe, just maybe, it also says something about our lack of loyalty when we can turn our noses up at the suffering of our own countrymen so easily….and do we act this way because it makes us look “cool” to hate on our fellow Americans? Let me break it to you gently….it does not.
I would love to see a return to a time when people took pause before they spoke…or hit “post”. The virtue signaling we have seen become such a normal part of our daily lives, especially over the last few years, makes me truly worry about our humanity, or lack thereof. Rather than sit and scroll and let ignorance seep out of fingertips and onto social media posts….why not actually do something about the events you feel are more tragic than the ones that are happening to our own neighbors? Maybe volunteer your time and presence in places like Ga__ and Uk___instead of telling others that their pain doesn’t mean anything because of their area code…..or is it easier to sit on your couch and pretend to be a warrior? I suppose it must be.
Despite all of this, I still have hope for people. I do worry about the lack of humanity, but then I remind myself that for every divisive and disparaging comment, there are many more offering grace, love and solace. Most of all I think and pray that we don’t lose the ability to understand that suffering is suffering, and one tragic event does not cancel another one out.
I want to end this post by stating that I chose to write about the LA fires because they hit so close to home for me, but I noticed this same terrible and inhumane commentary when Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina and other parts of the South. My heart goes out to all affected…everywhere.
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