Los Angeles is on fire amidst a worst-case-scenario convergence of dry brush, Santa Ana winds, a failing electrical grid and the occasional blow torch-wielding civilian.
The ballooning disaster exposed infrastructural and bureaucratic crises in the City of Angels. On the internet, it’s revealed a crisis of morality.
Internet users generally feel compassion for the 10,000-some people who have lost homes and businesses in the Palisades and Eaton fires — as they should.
Unless, of course, the victims are rich. Then, according to many on social media, they can take a walk
“Awwww poor rich people,” one Facebook user commented under a BBC News post about the Palisades fire.
“What a great view of the sunset,” an X user remarked on a video showing the charred remains of beach-front homes in Malibu.
The sentiment isn’t relegated to internet radicals or a single political party. Some commentors implied rich, “exploitative” fire victims got what was coming to them. A Facebook comment captured by Metro reads,“Meh, hard to feel sympathy for those who create and benefit from the policies that result in these kinds of disasters.”
A self-proclaimed right-wing pundit castigated rich people for “whining about their mansions” while poor victims of Hurricane Irma are “still out there freezing.”
The amount of money in a person’s pocket shouldn’t determine whether they deserve comfort and compassion (more on that later). But even if it did, comments like the ones above are based on the faulty assumption that only “wealthy” areas are burning.
News outlets spread this assumption far and wide, particularly during the fires’ genesis and rapid expansion. In one article, Reuters described the Pacific Palisades as “one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the U.S., home to Hollywood A-Listers and multimillion dollar mansions.”
But Pacific Palisades isn’t an exclusively wealthy enclave. Fox News contributor and Palisades homeowner Lindsey Kennedy explains:
Low-income families choose to pay the expensive property taxes, says Kennedy, so their children can attend better-performing public schools. Real estate websites like this one list public education as one of the Palisade’s best assets.
One Palisade neighborhood completely decimated by the fire was a mobile home park. Lynda Park lived in one of almost 200 destroyed trailers with her mother, husband and three sons. She told The New York Times,
Park and her family couldn’t afford pricy fire insurance. They have next to nothing left.
Similar stories abound across fire-ravaged neighborhoods. Though the median household income in Altadena is more than $129,000, according to the latest census data, 81-year-old Willie Jackson never paid a premium to live in the area.
“In those days [in the 1970’s],” Jackson told the Times, “the homes were costing $50,000. Now they’re over a million, $2 million.”
Jackson’s long-time neighbor, Victor Shaw, died trying to protect the home he inherited from his father and grandfather. Jackson escaped with his life — but his home of fifty years has been reduced to ashes.
If internet users choose to cast aspersions based on wealth, they should at least bother to make their valuations accurate. Geographical location is only one of countless factors that can indicate a family’s wealth.
But, in this case, accuracy is beside the point. Feeling confident enough to minimizing an entire neighborhood’s suffering based on limited knowledge of zip code you have never visited betrays a level of hubris I hope none of us will ever relate to.
To their credit, some on social media are waking up to what Metro calls the “eat the rich” response to LA’s destruction.
“People have been telling out-of-state firefighters not to come to LA to save ‘rich people,’” one popular X comment reads, continuing,
Another user added:
But that’s the problem: These fire-specific foibles stem from years of measuring people’s humanity based on external characteristics like wealth.
More on that morally bankrupt practice in Part II.
Additional Articles and Resources
California Wildfires and Our Search for God When Disaster Strikes
California Fires: Heartbreak, Questions and Few Good Answers
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