The House is on Fire

Reflections on the LA fires, and the lessons of post-disaster and exile as we brace for Trump 2.0.

The LA horizon on Friday

January 13. A week to go until Trump takes office….

As the LA fires still burn, what remains across the city is the post-shock aftermath of wreckage, loss, and disaster, as well as dislocation and overnight disorientation -- a dull feeling that follows drama and shock and adrenaline, when the reality of what one now faces and the scale of loss become clearer by the hour. The city or neighborhoods that existed hours before are gone or barely recognizable. One’s home, one’s school, one’s favorite bakery. All gone. The neighbor’s houses, reduced to smoldering ash. As I write, I just heard of another friend in Malibu who lost her gorgeous home. It’s just devastating.

It’s hard to take in the reality, even as it’s happening, even as the fires continue to burn, still threatening Brentwood and the mega-mansions of cinema stars, only partially contained after herculean efforts by sleepless crews of firefighters. There are metaphors and lessons in the LA fire for Trump 2.0, for what’s being destroyed, for what we are letting go of, for the leveling power of disaster, and what we are soberly contemplating as our new normal.

There’s also the creeping sense of exile, within and outside, that comes from landing, with little preparation, into a new landscape, one framed by what is missing. As a human species, we adapt, we attenuate. We immediately seek to regain our footing, some balance, in our new normal, even as the threat of danger remains acute, even as we know nothing is or can be the same now. That is our human instinct, toward survival, and it’s also what we are doing politically, as, day by day, it feels, we adjust or prepare to adjust, to a fast-changing reality, where our sense of what is normal or stands for it, is being ignored or cast aside, and, as so many have written, the guardrails are off.

Watch Duty, more popular than Meta

I’m writing from Brooklyn, where I got back yesterday, having gone to Los Angeles after a Christmas week in the Bay Area. My own LA story is small, but included an hour of personal high drama when I evacuated from Altadena and the advancing Eaton Fire just before the official notice to do so. I took refuge with friends in Koreatown, and from there, remained on alert, glued to the television and Watch Duty, the now-indispensable wildfire map and alert app that everyone quickly downloaded.

I ended up turning it off for a few hours on Thursday, because its alert notifications prevented easy sleep. But then I turned it back on, needing to stay vigilant, hyperaware as everyone remains there now, that people in Brentwood may still lose homes. I tracked the arrival of fresh teams of firefighters in bright yellow shirts, including a seasoned crew of Yellow Snakes from Mexico, and the spirited yellow shirts from South Africa, who were filmed by a news crew doing traditional dances as they arrived for the call of duty, everyone aware that the mission is very dangerous.

I still keep looking at Facebook -- sorry Meta -- every few hours, seeing updates from friends who haven’t yet left the app since Zuckerberg abandoned its fact-checking rules in obeisance to Trump. I know my time on Meta is also very limited; none of us can stay using it for long, given Zuck’s odious new open-door policy, and his public tolerance of homophobia. His move is gross and an overt effort to protect his company and future profits. (See my latest post in the Resisting Project 2025 ‘stack on the bro billionaires and the emerging media spin dictatorship for more.)

Also, let’s just say it here: the minute someone builds a decent app with guardrails against hate speech that can vie with Meta and the other apps owned by Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, there will be a massive exodus by progressives. Right now, it’s happening in smaller individual and organizational waves of refusal, as it did with X. We know we gotta go; a line has been drawn in the sand. We can’t be part of hate. That said, many of us who are longtime Facebook users (we never adopted Meta) need a virtual minute to make this shift, because we use it primarily to stay in touch with a global community of our loved ones and distant friends, in particular, and it’s hard to give that up without knowing where to recreate a similar sense of online community. We don’t want to lose our friends. We need time to communicate our plan with others, and in the middle of the LA fires, there hasn’t been any time.

As it stands, Meta is where I’m tracking friends there who have lost their homes, or are searching for cherished pets, who are still posting hourly updates, and Go Fund Me campaigns to help them recover and rebuild. They need community more than ever, so the sucky Zuck Meta saga is one more impending loss of community, albeit online. That’s another metaphor, but also another reality. Our sense of safety online is shifting, too.

The aftermath of the Eaton Fire in Altadena. Photo: Christina House, Los Angeles Times.

Let me take a minute here, then, to share my LA story. I vowed to myself to take the time to write down things that happened in this political time that matter. LA matters, especially coming on the eve of a new administration, as Trump 2.0 continues moving toward the White House like a bull in a china shop, ignoring all norms as before, embracing blame and rage and disruption and divisionism as his political modus operandi. Trump wasted not two seconds to begin blaming Governor Newsom and California state officials – a blue state, one with sanctuary laws against Trump’s looming “Day One” mass deportation plan – for botching the wildfire response. Threaten, break, and crush is his strategy. It’s working on people like Zuckerberg.

Let me stretch the metaphor, then: Trump 2.0 = the LA wildfire: an advancing scorched earth event.

Photo: Christina House

I’ve spent a lot of my life in disaster and post-disaster zones, including the violent period of the pro-democracy movement that ousted Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti in the 80s, and the historic Haiti earthquake of 2010. When major disaster happens, I tend to get weirdly calmer, and very focused. But my heart gets racing, as it did in LA. I had a moment, as I think of it, and that moment continues to ping around inside me, a reminder that I came close, yet again, to a moment of danger. Yet again, I got lucky.

Last Tuesday, I had gone to stay with a 90s NY friend, a journalist and his husband and their 4 1 ½ year-old-daughter, in a gorgeous house they’d been rebuilding at the very foot of the Altadena foothills. The trailhead is close to their house. I wasn’t familiar with Altadena or nearby Pasadena, though I lived in LA for a year in the early aughts. I met a close friend for lunch in Pasadena, and took some time to amble the cute shops, wondering if I could ever live happily in a place like it, almost bucolic, but slower than my NY life. My friends had made the shift, and seemed pretty happy. I decided I could enjoy it, including the warmer weather and the seriously overpriced restaurants, but for visits, not a move. I need to see people walking around. I’m not ready for the return to a car culture, though Altadena and Pasadena offered what my friend calls the best of both: a sense of real community and neighbors you know, with good schools, and access to the bigger LA city vibe a half-hour’s drive away. Plus they have the beautiful mountains, and regularly hiked. They loved it.

I got back to their house at about 6 pm and learned the power had been shut off by the city, as a precaution, due to the raging Palisades fire, and the winds which had been in the 100-mph range the previous night, howling all around us. The winds had woken me the night before. I looked outside the window and saw palm trees half bent, way further down than I thought possible. The Santa Ana winds, an annual event. We ate dinner, aware by then that a distant fire had broken out in the hills, but it was distant, not a threat. Then a friend texted, telling me her two close friends were evacuating that very minute. The fire was closer to us that we might be aware, she warned. You should maybe get out now. As my friends went upstairs to check out the situation from the second story window, I read stories to their daughter. Ten minutes later they came downstairs, all of us staying calm, the alarm in their eyes. We’re going.

They headed to Burbank; I had an invitation to Koreatown, to stay with Dudley Saunders, another 90s friends with a guest room. I was already packed and moved fast – so fast I forget my computer bag which they luckily picked up. Second later, I found myself in a quite unfamiliar part of Altadena, with the GPS on, noting the power outage and lack of lights on houses, and absence of traffic lights to help me navigate, noting a lot more fallen branches, and the wind, blowing stronger than earlier. Then, with a sense of alarm, I realized the air getting thicker with smoke, and lit embers were swirling around the car, small branches blowing across the highway, not great visibility. Shit, I realized suddenly, GPS is taking me wrong way. The app was directing me toward Lake Avenue, a normal route south, but now the one street my friends had warned me to avoid at all cost; it would be closer to the fire and likely crowded with evacuating cars. I gotta get out. Stay calm. Where do I go? Shit! I have no idea.

I called Dudley, who luckily picked up and quickly and patiently helped me exit the highway and maneuver smaller streets to head south. It was hard to see, a gridlock at each intersection without any traffic lights. I couldn’t figure out how to turn off GPS, and could barely hear him. Fire engines and emergency vehicles were heading toward and past me, toward the fire.

My mind went split-screen then, for moments, for seconds. I had a physical sense memory of driving this way at other times of danger. In Haiti, particularly. During the 1986 elections, after Haitian routed Baby Doc Duvalier and his family. Once when I was with my then-girlfriend, reporting, we were driving around to check out voting stations in a shantytown area of the capital, Port-au-Prince on election day. We made a turn and found ourselves facing a truck of armed men. They were not happy to see us. As I rapidly reversed course, driving backward for a second like in a Hollywood action movie, I thought, as in did in LA on Tuesday, uh-oh, this is not good. Back then, we were stuck in a cul de sac. I turned the car right and straight over the road down a hilly stretch that ended in a ravine. Somehow, a dirt road appeared. We got out.

I got lucky then; I got lucky in Altadena. It took me around an hour to get home. It took hours for the adrenaline to ebb, and then it would spike, as we stayed glued to the news and fire alerts, feeling safe, but vigilant. The fires were far away from Koreatown. By noon the next day, I learned the Altadena friends who evacuated with their dogs just before we did lost their house; only the foundation of a gorgeous mid-century modern is left. My Altadena hosts drove back from Burbank to find theirs is the sole house standing; all the neighbors lost their homes. My friends had covered the wooden eaves of the original house with stucco in their upgrade, and recently pulled up their driveway, removing tinder for the fire. Their upstairs window melted, but the screen prevented sparks from coming in.

Theirs is now one of the rare houses that survived in Altadena, and Pasadena and the Palisades.

That won’t shield them from suffering other devastation. The air quality remains unsafe, especially for children. If and when they return, they’ll be in a wasteland, surrounded by painful memories of everything that’s missing. Then the rebuilding will start, and last months into years.

They’ll also feel the internal dislocation that marks the post-disaster landscape, the feeling of disorientation when the familiar is both missing and still present. It's so surreal, we all agreed, as we watched the parts of LA marked safe resettle overnight into a cautious semblance of some normality. That’s LA, a friend remarked. People feel like they have to move forward. In Koreatown, and elsewhere, people were back in cafes by Thursday, walking around almost normally, even as we tracked the progress of the fire on Watch Duty. At one point, we got a sudden LA-wide alert to immediately evacuate. I felt the immediate spike of adrenaline, while searching Watch Duty and CNN, but there was no icon of fire nearby. Forget it, it’s wrong, said Dudley’s partner, who calmly headed for the gym. Ten minutes later, we got the error message. The alert had been meant for just for the Kenner Fire area, far enough away.

Image: CNN

Yesterday was the 15-year anniversary of the historic earthquake that leveled Haiti. It killed a number of my friends. It caused my grandmother’s beautiful old antebellum-style gingerbread house in the capital to be razed due to structural damage. January 12^th, 2010, is the day the Haiti of my childhood disappeared, and a new one emerged from mountains of rubble and piled up debris and rebar. So many people were initially trapped under the overnight concrete tomb of the capital and bigger cities. The stench of death of death remained for weeks. I flew to the island via Santo Domingo a few days after the quake, and drove toward the capital in a four-wheel drive, navigating the debris. I learned of friends who died; others were missing. I stayed on and off for six months, returning often until 2015.

Everything I saw and experienced then remains embedded in my personal firmament. You can’t unsee things in a disaster. You also find yourself looking, constantly, instinctively, for what was there before. That house, that store, that street. What’s been physically erased is your life in that place. The city you knew is gone. A new one will spring up, and that only makes the task of memory harder. It feels critically important, especially in those early days, to remember what was just there, just hours ago, just before. The act of memory becomes an exercise in survival, a personal resistance, a refusal to let the disaster take even more away.

LA Country has become that site of remembering, a place of both ongoing, likely future trauma, and post-trauma, already facing the natural human demand for some return to normalcy, for a balance, for re-grounding. People are displaced, homeless, couch surfing, their animals left in the care of the Humane Society, to be fostered, because they can’t bring them to free AirBnB houses provided to evacuees for a week. They need housing; they need a rental. They face the coming task of recovery and rebuilding while continuing to emotionally process the shock. That competing set of emotional demands is also applicable to the looming conflagration of Trump 2.0. We need to prepare ourselves, to ready for big loss, even as we experience fresh shocks, assaults on the rule of law, on our system of justice, all the while knowing others have it far worse. There is so much to do, and no time now; the fires are advancing.

In a Meta posting earlier this week, I talked about what I began to focus on, in equal measure to the advancing fire, during my days in LA.It was about the need to shift from helpless and hopeless to helping and building hope. In helping others, we help ourselves. We shift of our energy away form despair, and being overwhelmed. It’s a reminder, a lesson for us to take in and take up, as we experience, witness, and brace for the losses and future fights that mark Trump’s return to power. A reminder that, when disaster happens, people instinctively look to help each other, to help their neighbors, especially after they have secured their own safety. We witnessed fresh stories in LA by the hour, watching brave locals hosing down their neighbors’s homes, people rescuing scores of animals, leading horses to safety. No one stops to ask, are you MAGA, or are you a lib? Are you trans? What divides us falls away in the face of survival. What unites us is what we have to lose.

That’s a lesson now, for all of us progressives. So is the instinct to gather our nearest and dearest and make emergency plans. We need political go-bags for our organizations, if we haven’t been planning for the attacks to come, the possible losses. We need something equivalent to a political Watch Duty mapping app to track the frontlines of Project 2025, which is Trump 2.0, as it unfolds as of Day One. Some groups are doing that, or doing their version. Our campaign, Resisting Project 2025, is focused on reporting on resistance, in relation to that unfolding. But we need to start mapping and systematically tracking who is stepping up, and where, and look for and make new alliances, in order to cope with the scope of attacks to come.

I was just talking about this yesterday with Bob Lederer, an activist colleague from our shared 90s ACT UP days, who cohosts Out FM, a radio program on WBAI, part of the Pacifica radio network We are having a conversation on that program tomorrow, Tuesday Jan. 14^th, at 8 pm EST to talk about the “Day One” attacks we know about and what’s being done in response. We also talked about Zuckerberg’s capitulation to Trump, the hallmark voluntary obeisance to autocracy, as historian Timothy Snyder has put it. I asked Bob if colleagues at WBAI and other progressive public radio stations are preparing for what’s about to come, especially queer journos. Project 2025 aims to defund NPR and PBS, and weaponize FCC licensing as a way to impose fees and limit access for ‘left of the dial’ stations like WBAI and KQED, also a Pacific outlet. Are people ready? What are they doing? Any emerging ideas to share?

They’re not prepared, he said, but are getting ready. A post-inauguration Zoom strategy call for producers is already planned.

Bob and I and many journo and activist colleagues who cut our political teeth in ACT UP (and reporting on the AIDS movement) know that disaster and crisis produce action and inaction, divisionism and new coalition building. We don’t know who will step up and we watch in dismay as people reveal cowardice, a la Zuckerberg. But we have many leaders in our communities who know how to organize, who’ve fought similar issue battles in the past, and are experienced in coalition and movement building. New leaders will emerge from the ranks of those most targeted, that’s an easy one to predict.

I told Bob I foresee much of the resistance to Trump going local, and statewide, as federal funding is cut or gets redirected into block grants and punted to the states, and as state laws and policies oppose or trump federal ones, including Trump 2.0 Executive Orders. As we saw in LA, locals know best who is impacted and at risk, where resources may exist to tap into, who is positioned to help, who is hindering an effective response, who will lead in the private sector. As I keep my eye on Watch Duty in LA, I’m taking mental notes from other lessons of disaster and political crisis that may be applicable to what looms in a week.

In LA, there’s an urgent overnight need for mental health services and personal emotional support groups for survivors and evacuees. Across America, among progressives, we need to organize around protection and on emotional prep, too. We don’t have a Watch Duty app for Trump 2.0, but we have Project 2025, which provides the blueprint for the political attacks, and makes clear the priorities. Over at Democracy 25, many legal groups are primed for their Day One resistance to the 100+ “Day One” Executive Orders that Stephen Miller discussed with Republican leaders this week. An offshoot Civil Service Strong portal offers resources for federal workers and whistleblowers, and organizations worried about a weaponized IRS. As progressives, some of our yellow shirt first responders are in position, already digging fire line trenches to resist. Others are moving toward the frontlines.

As we saw in LA, many new ordinary heroes will emerge in the weeks and months ahead. As new threats unfold, so will new community responses and strategies to fight back. The moment of shock is past; we are in new territory now. We know who Trump is; we know what Project 2025 represents. We have to navigate now like survivors in a post-disaster landscape, where the ground is still shifting, where safety is relative or elusive, where many are hurting, where new fires may break out while older ones still rage.

As in LA, the fight-back means choosing which fire to put out first. We must prioritize. We can’t fight every attack; we have to work with limited resources. But we are many, and there are many strategies employed to fight a fire. We can look around to ask, who is already mobilizing on this issue? and join or support them. The political mutual aid must be local, intersectional, and grounded in community. But as LA – and Haiti – remind us, we must act to protect and rebuild even as we mourn, even as we imagine a future that is hard to see from the ground of ash and chaos.

Actions and Podcasts

On that note, there are over 100 cities planning protests, rallies and marches linked to Women’s March and The People’s March on January 18^th, and more happening in and around DC, including January 20^th. Go to www.thepeoplesmarch and type in your zip code to see what may be planned near you. Or consider organizing a local event with allies.

Don’t forget to join the conversation about queer resistance tomorrow on Out FM and the relaunch of our Resisting Project 2025 podcast (live, and streaming) Wednesday, Jan. 15^th, at 7 pm-8:30 pm EST. Theme: Resistance 2.0: The emerging playbook to fight Trump 2.0 and Project 2025. We do our show with a live audience at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, 208 W. 13^th Street, 2^nd floor, and will include a Q&A period, so please join us. We also invite you to subscribe to our campaign newsletter and join our campaign at www.resisistingproject2025.org.

Final note: Among the many pleas for help, this one deserves our collective response. A Go Fund Me has been launched for Black families displaced from Altadena, a historically Black city of LA county, who have lost their homes. Please consider your support.

In the meantime, all eyes on Los Angeles. All good energies, all support, all solidarity.