Watching Los Angeles Burn

My sister-in-law, who evacuated her home, shares insights from L.A. to Gaza

Over the last few days, multiple simultaneous fires have raged in Los Angeles County. Fanned by high-speed winds, the wildfires have destroyed thousands of buildings and killed five people. The population density and higher socioeconomic status of the affected areas, as well as the number of concurrent fires, has made this a seemingly-unprecedented inferno.

While this wildfire has left many Americans shocked, it’s impossible for me not to look at the photos of the gray, ashy rubble of Altadena’s buildings or the orange, smoky skyline of Malibu and not see the fires of the Jabaliya and Nuseirat refugee camps of the last year. It’s impossible for me not to see the link between the way we have pillaged the earth and have destroyed indigenous practices (such as smaller, controlled fires) here on this land and how we’ve funded and supported a settler-colonial project in its destruction of an indigenous population on another land. And it is therefore remarkable to me that we can then sit here and wonder how on earth that destruction found its way back to us.

I come back to this question: what makes America untouchable? Why is disaster, when it finds its way to our backyard, so unexpected?

Perhaps it is not the fires in Los Angeles that are unprecedented, but American belief in its own exceptionalism. Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked by the destruction, but by the belief that we are somehow immune from it.

I connected with my sister-in-law Dema, who evacuated her home near Pasadena yesterday with her husband and three children and is staying with her parents. Multiple of her friends’ homes have been destroyed by the fire, as have the places she frequents in her surrounding neighborhood.

Below is a transcription of our conversation:

SM: Thanks for talking with me, Dema. Maybe you can start with telling me about the background and what’s going on with your house?

DS: I mean I feel bad, my house is OK–it’s just like, I shouldn’t be complaining because my house is still there. From my personal experience, first of all–it started the day before yesterday, the winds were so scary, astaghfirullah–it sounded like jahannam (Hellfire), you know how the Qur’an describes the sound of the fire–it was all wind. It was so scary. The morning I was supposed to go to work, I woke up to all these messages and everybody evacuating and all these alerts, and I decided we needed to leave.

SM: What was that like for you?

DS: Yeah, when [my son] got up, he was shaking. My kids sleep in a bunk bed and out of precaution, my husband moved our son’s mattress to the floor because we have huge trees around the house. When my husband went home yesterday, there was a huge branch that fell near their room.

The first thing I saw when we were evacuating was his tremor, this fear in his eyes. I felt as a mom, you know how you instinctively want to protect them and my mind just flashed to Gaza. How do these moms do it? This is–alhamdulillah, relatively on the scale of threat–it’s pretty low. Yes, there’s no power, but we have running water, a car, we have a safe place to take refuge. There’s no bombs, how do you do this in a tent? We were protected by a solid structure, and yet there’s all this fear. We’re dry, we have full bellies, how do they do it? I felt helpless.

It kind of gave me a glimpse, a little window of empathy, and honestly, I felt for Gaza immediately. I think I downplayed the whole thing, and figured we would be back that same night–I didn’t even bring–not even a change of clothes, but then as we were driving down the street, I had to zigzag around huge trees and debris, and as we were driving down the mountain behind my house, I could see red flames through the valley. Clear flames, subhanAllah, but the threat seems far away–I didn't know if it was naive–and you still feel a sense of security. Altadena looks like absolute hell.

SM: Do you think there was so much going on that it was just kind of hard to process the sense of danger?

DS: I don’t know if I would have freaked out more if this was last year, but honestly after watching the genocide for the last fifteen months, it almost is like a sense of calm. We’re not running for our lives in that way. Alhamdulillah.

SM: That’s the hard thing for me to get my head around, is some people did lose everything. But at the same time, it’s in a different context.

DM: Yeah, two of my babysitters and a friend ten minutes away lost everything. The place I grocery shop, my gym–it’s all gone. It’s almost not real, I feel like I need to see it myself. It’s very close. I don’t know, maybe I had a false sense of security. Alhamdulillah, the wind was pushing it in a different direction then when we were. I don’t know, for me, maybe it was a false sense of security.

[My husband] went back yesterday, and there’s a lot of debris, the branches narrowly missed the roof on either side of the house. Alhamdulillah, I feel like Allah spared us.

SM: It sounds like what you’re saying though is that seeing what’s happened in Gaza kind of affected your experience even though it was so close to home for you.

DS: Yeah, it’s like all over Instagram we’ve been seeing Gaza, Rafah. I mean, I hate to say it, it’s like I have empathy, but also…of course this is going to happen here. I hope this will elevate the class consciousness that we seem to not have in this country. I’ve been hearing about insurance companies who just stopped insurance coverage three weeks ago. In the Palisades the fire hydrants ran out of water. We cut funding to LAFD.

Our priorities in this society are just so upside down. I honestly feel like the insurance companies are just the devils and in light of what happened with Luigi Mangione, it’s almost surreal to see this unfold. I hope it wakes up people. A whole 8 billion dollar package to Israel–why? Why billions there, where is this America first, I don’t understand.

With these tragedies, they’re going to become more and more common, you know you read about it, and in North Carolina the same thing happened with Hurricane Helene, it was shocking and maddening back then. And then again to see it in your own backyard, when people you know were affected. When are we as a society going to wake up and say enough is enough, we need to invest in our own people?

SM: Yeah, it’s just crazy seeing it in your own backyard, I’m sure. How are you guys doing now?

DS: I’m not in my own element, and it’s tough not being in my own house, and it’s hard–the kids are fighting with each other, you know–we take our homes and our comfort, our little things, so much for granted. SubhanAllah, sometimes it has to be taken away to have empathy for those who have even less. Honestly, the kids–seeing them so scared–my son was asking, “our house is going to be okay?” and my daughter was asking if she could watch something on the drive to teta’s, and I was like, “We’re in an emergency, we don’t need to be entertained right now.” [laughs]

SM: [Laughs] I mean, there’s kind of an innocence to that right, to be a kid and unaware.

DS: Yeah, and I think about the kids in Gaza–how are they surviving dodging bullets for a year? How do they process it? Do they get similarly desensitized–like that’s not a very big bomb?

And, you know, like James Woods crying about his house, but he said “Kill Them All”–who says stuff like that about people? I mean–even the worst people–they don’t say things like that.

I was thinking though about the people who lost their homes, can they even connect that to Gaza? And what our government is funding versus our government’s capacity to help us? Do they think about that, and if not, shouldn’t they? I’m almost hoping this is an awakening for the L.A. area, like some kind of revolution.

SM: Yeah–you mentioned earlier about insurance companies not covering people’s houses? I mean, if the insurance companies are not funding the rebuild, that’s going to wreak havoc for so many people.

DS: Right, even if you’re not paying attention to what’s happening in Gaza, you are going to pay attention to where your government is spending money. And how insurance companies make decisions to cut your coverage.

SM: I think it’s like what you said about UnitedHealthcare, the same issues of denying coverage and laypeople bearing the brunt of that.

DS: Yeah, it’s not just health insurance, it’s also house insurance that can cut your coverage with all these loopholes. Like, that guy was making a statement, it’s not red vs. blue, it’s not left vs. right, it’s literally up vs. down, they’ve been getting away with it, and that has to change.

People here don’t care until they personally suffer. Gaza is far–they can’t see that it’s connected. It’s all connected, climate change, insurance companies, but people are disconnected, they don’t see it, or they don’t have the desire to see it. How long can we sustain this?

But then I think, there’s elementary school shootings, and nothing changes. I think the system in America is not designed for regular Americans at all, and sadly my non-optimistic view of the world, it makes me think nothing will meaningfully change. Even if they make some changes to quiet some people, they know how to silence the masses.

SM: It’s true, I mean they don’t care about Americans dying why would they care about Gazans dying.

DS: One of my babysitters, she said, I hope more people will be affected by what’s going on in Gaza. Everyone she knows has been protesting, doesn’t go to Starbucks. Those young people give me hope. At my age, I feel like I’m broken. I see all these GoFundMe pages for people raising money for their houses or their hospital stays, it’s just sad–

SM: –yeah, it’s so weird that we just accept that as normal that we need to rely on private donors for basic necessities rather than our government securing them.

DS: Yeah and the way the media writes about this stuff, it’s almost to the other side. I mean, we’ll see–it’s still coming so I don’t know what they’ll say about this–but they write “people die”, “tents burned”, who did that? They write it to where you don’t know who did it. I wonder if they’re going to do the same with the insurance companies. Are they going to draw the connection about 8 billion going to foreign affairs versus back here at home? They don’t make the connections for the public, you have to do it on your own. Media is complicit in all of this, just like they are in the wars, they manufacture consent for climate change, for insurance companies loopholes.

Unless some billionaire, like James Woods, maybe someone who was affected by it, starts some class action lawsuit. These people are people with means and maybe they can make some changes.

SM: Yeah, although they are probably also going to have the means to not be as affected by all this.

DS: Yeah, I mean my cynical view is that things don’t change, but you know I just hope this wakes people up and they start taking notice.

SM: Yeah, I hope so, too. I know there’s a lot going on and I appreciate you sharing your perspective with others, Dema.

***

What I found tremendous about talking with Dema (and I wish I had recorded it so that you could hear her share it in her own way), was that she, too, saw Gaza in all this. Before talking to her, I wondered if I was seeing the comparisons to Gaza from the comfort of my own home and being removed from the devastation in L.A. But Dema, who herself is “displaced”, felt the same. Alhamdulillah, their home is standing, and hopefully they are able to return soon. I hope that L.A. is able to rebuild. And I hope that, just as Dema said, that this horror is a means of reflection and, yet another opportunity for America to change course. I just hope our government takes it.