We began 2025 ablaze.
The winds reached over 90 miles per hour. Our windows, locked and bolted, blew open in the middle of the night. Our phones blasted post-apocalyptic alarms sounding evacuation orders. The world smelled scorched. We walked outside and couldn’t breathe. We kept our heads down. To my left, the sky was a burning orange; to my right, I could see nothing but smoke.
I went to bed on Tuesday night asking my father to confirm that he was safe. I woke up on Wednesday to dozens of texts from loved ones across the country asking me to do the same. I checked in with my friends; some were relegated to their homes, some had to evacuate their homes and some had family members made newly homeless.
Misinformation and anger both easily spread. This disaster can be viewed in isolation as an event that disrupted primarily the rich and famous, but it would behoove us to not become so polarized. There are communities that cannot afford to rebuild, families that are forced to separate and live in different states, people who have lost their homeowner’s insurance, middle and lower class neighborhoods that have been reduced to burnt edifices, small businesses that are permanently closed, animals and children without homes.
It is unsettling to be in this place where we cannot breathe, where we keep our heads down, whether it be from sickness or suffocating ash or even more suffocating fear. It is unsettling to anxiously go to bed waiting for one text and to wake up to an anxious dozen more, to watch homes feet away from the ocean fall to flames.
This moment in time is strange because it is tinged with feelings and behaviors I can remember on a somatic level from other periods of my lifetime. The cities look how they did during the George Floyd protests back in 2020. People are crying and holding strangers as their cities burn. The people look how they did during the peak of COVID-19 in early 2021. Everyone is wearing masks and keeping their eyes low, their voices muffled.
Once again, the news outlets are frenetic. Once again, professionalism has been overridden by unhideable devastation as networks broadcast raw grief. Over my lifetime, I have learned to determine the severity of a disaster by the degree of professionalism that remains intact onscreen.
Entire neighborhoods have become black, post-apocalyptic flatlands. California looks sick. Part of me wonders if this is indicative of a sickness brewing beneath this disaster. Part of me wonders if this is a mere ember in the burgeoning wildfire that is our national disintegration.
Politicians ill-favored in California, if not blaming Democratic leaders for their handling of the wildfires, offer little more than perfunctory thoughts and prayers. Preachers offer more action and less prayer than politicians. There is great pride and shame in being a nation where the masses run into flames to save each other, but we question whether “no costs barred” aid might be the same under the name of a different presidential administration. It saddens me that a natural disaster can be so unnaturally politicized.
I hate that a wildfire makes me think of politics.
In the wake of mass destruction and individual devastation, my mom told me how a beloved friend’s house, located in an epicenter of the fires, was somehow left unscathed. But when the woman opened her front door, she saw that it was ransacked by thieves. All of her precious belongings were stolen.
I hate that a wildfire makes others think of stealing.
And I wonder: have we not learned? Why do we add further fuel to this fire — both metaphorically and literally? This disaster has shown us that money does not save us. Wealth does not protect us. Status does not shield us. This event is catastrophic and socially significant because it is leveling. In making wealth, title and status secondary factors during a time of crisis, this event forces us to reconsider what is important.
I would hope that such a deeply human disaster eliminates room for inhumane action or hyper-political discourse, and yet even I am guilty of the latter.
Devastation has become a cyclical American disorder. This is not merely a one-off example of a natural disaster; this is a national pathology. A state in our union has cities covered in ash, and politicians use this event to advance their own agendas — or to denigrate their opponents’. A state in our union attempts to stave off city-spanning wildfires, and looters leverage the turmoil, panic and pandemonium to steal frivolous, nonessential goods.
Where there is preexisting crisis, there seems to be a tendency toward opportunistic harm.
I have been on this planet for 18 years. I have spent my whole life living here. I have lost count of how many times I have experienced this feeling that I have right now. This feeling of desperation and grief riddled with hope and unity, marred by cynicism, inflamed by defiance.
Despite all of the destruction, I am moved by the love and courage that brought people together, that transcended city lines and wealth gaps and race and gender to remind us that we all bleed red.
As devastating as this time may be, it has also revealed to me some of the most beautiful aspects of humanity. I am watching people across my state build from wreckage, embody the change they wish to see and bleed and grieve and give as one. We cannot deny that the physically leveling force of this catastrophe destroyed so much — homes, businesses, bonds, histories. But the endurance of humanity in conscientious community leaders and fearless citizens tells me that these things, while absolutely important, are not even remotely paramount because, at the end of the day, that’s all they are — things. Times like these remind us of the power that is intrinsic to us as human beings, the power that requires nothing more than us. I hope you feel it. I hope you wish to seize it.
Moments like these spark recognition and remembrance. They remind me of my intrinsic drive to generate a positive change on this planet while I am still breathing. They inspire me to inspire you to generate a positive change on this planet while you are still breathing.
We hold different views on what exactly the legacy of these fires will be. But we all can see its destructive force. Rather than divide ourselves along party lines, play blame games or argue over whose experience is worse, why don’t we use our shared understandings of grief and hardship to show compassion? This affects all of us, blue and red, high and low-income. We have an opportunity to unite against a disaster, rather than allow that disaster to divide us.
And so I ask you: will you be the looters hiding behind the flames, or will you be the good Samaritan who perseveres in spite of, indeed, because of them?
The choice is yours every single day.
MIA GORLICK is a first year in Pierson College. She can be reached at mia.gorlick@yale.edu.