Sometime in the 1980's, as a young college dropout living somewhere in the Boston area, and spending a lot of time hanging around the hub of activity of all sorts that was Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one day I got word that Pete Seeger was going to be speaking at a class. Back then you didn't need an ID card to enter a building, you could just walk in. Maybe the public were welcome to that class, I don't remember, but it was just me and a couple dozen students, in any case.
I think Pete might have played a song or two, but all I remember was the story he told. Maybe I remember the story in particular because he cried a bit in the course of telling it.
It was a fictional story, about how some scientist had discovered that by mixing together several commonly-found, easily-available compounds of the sort you might use to clean your bathroom floor, you could create a powerful bomb.
There were efforts to suppress the information but eventually word got out, and humanity braced for impact. In Pete's tale, what happened next was both sides of the civil war in Peru that was then very violently ongoing used the new bomb recipe, to apocalyptic effect.
The whole country was just destroyed, with a staggering death toll. Watching the millions of refugees streaming out of their ruined land, in Pete's tale the rest of the world came together and made a plan to prevent this kind of thing from happening anywhere else.
Realizing that if any disgruntled person could so easily just make a bomb that would destroy the neighborhood, the only way forward was radical equality and empathy, with societies focused on taking care of each other, and making sure no one wanted to blow up the neighborhood.
For days now I've been glued to the news even more than usual, watching these hurricane-strength winds blow flames all over the Los Angeles area, with thousands of homes destroyed already, and so many people, including friends of mine, waiting to find out what will become of theirs.
As I hear the horror stories from a burning megalopolis, I'm reminded of Pete's little parable, in so many ways.
Of course it's the combination of the parched Earth, steep hillsides, fast winds, all in an urban setting, that make the LA area so susceptible to fire, along with poor infrastructure and other factors. But most of the fires start out with either some kind of accident, like a cigarette butt, or a chain dragging behind a car, or with arson.
At a juncture like this, especially, every individual has the power to blow up the neighborhood, essentially, either by accident or on purpose, with no particular effort at all.
Not only does everyone have the power to burn down the neighborhood with a cigarette, but every individual's home or business is completely interdependent on everyone else's homes and businesses, in terms of how their properties are prepared for fire. It's no good if just some of the homes in a neighborhood are well-designed for fire. They all need to be, in order for the fire not to have a foothold to spread from.
At times when there isn't such a crisis going on, I hear frequent news reports about the difficulties they have up and down the west coast trying to retain sufficient numbers of firefighters. The firefighters are chronically underpaid -- pay that never nearly keeps up with the ever-worsening housing crisis -- and the departments are chronically understaffed, as a general rule.
LA completely embodies the concept of the endless American suburb, where people have historically gone to buy their little patch of paradise, or their big patch of paradise, depending on how wealthy they may be. But now paradise has burned, again. And whether you're one of the estimated 70,000 people in Los Angeles County living on the streets (some of whom may be staying warm in the winter with propane heaters in their tents), or a movie star in a mansion with a nice, safe, fireplace, we're all equal under the Santa Anna winds, just as prone to the errant cigarette butt as everyone else, just as strong as the weakest link in the chain.
As terrible as the ongoing burning of LA continues to be, if we don't radically change course as a society, the future is absolutely guaranteed to be astronomically worse.
If we continue to follow our current path here in the USA, which can mainly be characterized as what they call the "free market," then after the fires in LA, just like after the fires in Santa Rosa, Paradise, Talent, Phoenix, Detroit (Oregon), and so many other cities and towns, what comes next is fire insurance becomes either far more expensive or unavailable, while the cost of buying or renting continues to increase far beyond most anyone's earnings do, forcing people to move further and further away from urban centers, into more fire-prone rural areas.
Here in Portland, Oregon, so far away from Los Angeles, we can be sure that the housing crisis will continue to worsen, as we welcome our friends who will be moving here from LA. Anyone from Portland can tell you that that's going to happen, because most of the people that most of us know around here these days are from southern California. I would also have moved here if I were from southern California, I understand completely, and hasten to add I certainly don't harbor the least bit of ill will towards people from California, Mexico, China, or anywhere else.
But as soon as someone who does blame people from California or Mexico for the rising cost of housing around here -- and someone will -- then they will be playing the game of the land-owning banks and hedge funds anyone who rents or bought a house in the past two decades or so is probably deeply beholden to right now.
Yes, what comes next along with the rising cost of housing and more migrants from LA and wherever else will be more of the blame game accelerating. Some will blame the migrants for the rising costs -- deport them! Others will blame the racists for attacking the migrants.
No one will blame the corporations doubling and tripling our rents. The algorithms won't promote that sort of thing, and the FBI doesn't want to promote it, either, and neither does the corporate media.
That's what's coming -- more of the same repercussions from the fires, along with more fires. At least, that's what's coming if we continue along the route of housing as an investment market for people to do whatever they want with.
It could all be radically different, but then we'd have to first collectively acknowledge that there's such a thing as society, and that we need to live in a country that makes policies accordingly. And then we'd need to build a social movement powerful enough to force the political class to implement those policies, starting with things like real rent control, and a real plan for adapting to climate change, and to implement the other sorts of policies one can commonly find in so many other, more functional countries where there is a widespread belief in the existence of society.
Where it's not just talk about everyone having an "equal shot," as our outgoing president loves to say, but having actual equality -- the kind of equality that is not just morally right, but that our future absolutely depends on.
My January, 2024 album, Notes From A Holocaust, which was deleted from my discography on Spotify with no notification or explanation last August, is now back up on that hegemonic platform with an altered name -- we'll see for how long. If you do Spotify, please listen & share!
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