I spent a week and a half of my summer with my friends Ethan and Richard in Southern California, and it was full of new sights and experiences. At Mission Beach, tightrope walkers dug posts into the sand and danced on air, twirling hoops and batons. In Hillcrest, San Diego's "gay district," rainbow flags flew over Afghan, Greek, Armenian and Thai restaurants, considered by locals to be the area's best dining. In Poway I ate apricots from trees. In the evening, the golden sun went down over the cacti as San Diego's lights lit up the mountains.
And now San Diego is in flames. Poway has been evacuated, and Ethan watches the blaze from his front yard. The San Diego fire might have caused more damage than Hurricane Katrina, though its damages have just pushed the $1 billion mark, whereas Katrina's estimates are placed around $86 billion. In contrast to his response to Katrina, President George W. Bush is looking good; an article on CNN.com says that he signed a major disaster declaration, helping to "speed federal dollars to people whose property losses aren't covered by insurance and will help local and state agencies pay for the emergency response... Federal help keeps arriving as officials promise a response based on lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina."
I was thinking about San Diego on Sunday morning at church when another friend, Landon, told me something I may never forget.
"Individualism is detrimental," he said. "We asked for more privacy, and now we're more alone than ever."
Indeed, the privatization and lowered cost of technology has led many of us to a shade of loneliness at which we never thought we'd arrive. I have no reason to watch California burn with my family if I have my own TV, nor is sharing a computer with my parents necessary if the Internet runs to my bedroom. And with those anchors of information within 10 feet of where I sleep, I'm free to watch the world fall apart in peace.
Midwesterners are often intrigued by the Deep South's romance and mystery and had only New Orleans' poverty-stricken residents and Mardi Gras celebrations to relate to Hurricane Katrina. Sure, they host the country's biggest party every year and they're far away, but we can forgive them if they spend the rest of it in squalor, right?
But Southern California is a different. Two thousand miles across the country, the cosmopolitan nature of its seemingly bizarre inhabitants runs upstream of conservative Midwestern values: Afghan food and forehead piercing are frightening. Concurrently, we are wowed to jealousy by the wealth we've seen on "The O.C.," "Laguna Beach" and "The Hills." But there's a lesson here: "They" were as much a part of "Us" then as they are now.
And Sarah Maclachlan sends a benediction over the old-man angels in my memory: "The world's on fire/And it's more than I can handle."
Write to Joel at jtmiller@bsu.edu
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