OK BUT NOT OK
My beloved Los Angeles is on fire. I don’t know what day it is or how long we’ve been in it. We aren’t new to wildfires or natural disasters but this is different. My family is ok & not in imminent danger. But I’m very much NOT ok. None of us are. We are on edge. Traumatized. And it’s not over. It feels as if it’s barely begun. Yesterday a man was arrested for arson just blocks from my home in Silver Lake. And we keep getting EVACUATION WARNINGS — those type of Amber Alerts that are shocking & loud & come out of no where, the kind that make you gasp & panic. But they are mostly false, sent out in error. So each time I get one, I’m frantically texting a screengrab of my phone with “did you get this?” over & over to different text chains of friends & neighbors. Then we crowdsource if it’s real or another mistake by someone who shouldn’t be making these mistakes. All the while you keep finding out that someone else you know has lost everything. EVERY.THING. Their home burned to the ground. They just made it out with their lives. One family in my circle was looking for shoes for their kids who didn’t have any. Another family was looking for baby things because she was due to deliver any day now & no longer had the things she needed to bring a baby home to a home that no longer exists. Our soccer coach & his three kids lost their home. Our plumber & his three kids lost his. And his van with all of his tools so he can’t even get back to work. Our therapist, too. And I’m not alone in this. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know a family who lost everything. And I don’t know anyone who isn’t doing something like housing a family or searching for things these families need. I’ve also learned that my earthquake evac kits like all good Californians have are wildly different from a wildfire evac kit. I had panic paralysis when packing to leave, stunned because nothing seemed important to me besides my kids. I now know that we’d need cash, passports, birth certificates, passwords & things that can’t be replaced. Our car is packed with a terribly unorganized mish-mash of I-don’t-know-what. But we are in our house & needing things from the car so we go down & tear through it to find things but then they end up back in the house in their normal spots. So we are very much not packed with the essentials right now because we are frantically somewhere in between. And then there’s our “leaders” who we watch during the live press conferences desperate to know that someone has got it under control. They don’t. They are smiling & saying “we will rebuild!” which is what everyone says in a disaster … but fuck off, that’s so incredibly tone deaf & out of touch with what people need right now. The fires are 0% contained, communities are still evacuating, people lost their homes & don’t have insurance (because insurance companies canceled their policies without warning because they don’t want to do what we pay them to do). And FEMA is already rejecting applications for support. We already had a housing shortage & unaffordable housing but now more people are in need of someplace to live. So, I’d really like our leaders to deal with these issues before we even think of rebuilding. I’m heading back out to check on my horse, repack the car & donating things to families who need them …