Around and around we go...

"I criticize by creation - not by finding fault."
- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

I spent last Tuesday night fighting a brush fire. It wasn’t my first time doing such a thing, but it was an unexpected way to kick off the holiday weekend. I spent many years of my life living in southern California where you have the biannual destruction of the vegetation and collection of the insurance payouts. It’s an amazing cycle of payola/rebirth/destruction. Ever since El Nino departed the area has been dried out by the time the Santa Anna winds arrive every year. At the drop of a match, flare, or cigarette it bursts into flames.

As I raked furiously at burning leaves I thought about the times out there when our entire town was threatened by brush fire. It makes people do strange things. You never know a person until you see how they react in a truly stressful situation. I remember riding around in my jeep delivering sandwiches and drinks to the water truck drivers with ash falling in thick globs like some sort of weird hot weather snowstorm. I almost got shot as a looter. The drivers appreciated it though as they spent two days trapped inside the town when the highway was closed in both directions. Nobody complained and nobody bitched, we were all there to help and people appreciated it.

Until the news crews and FEMA showed up. Then the story changed to “It was every man for himself!” and “Where was our government?” In a dress rehearsal for Katrina President Bush told someone to go take care of it but never checked to see if they had. The governor dragged his feet about accepting federal help throughout the whole debacle (I think it cost him re-election, and rightly so). Of course, right in the middle to hype the spin was the news service.

I watched as a gentleman calmly explained that he felt lucky that a water truck had stood by his house for six hours in the middle of the night. He ended his story by mentioning the truck left when the wind shifted. The next day a story in the paper was headlined “Water trucks flee fire scene!”

Good news doesn’t sell evidently. Every media outlet was busy bashing the response so if your story didn’t reflect ineptitude by someone it wasn’t worthy. Now I am not saying the government got it right by any means, but the media painted them with broad strokes.

The FEMA people who showed up to handle claims were mostly part timers. There is no large trained staff of claims people sitting in Mount Weather waiting to jump on a plane to respond to a disaster. FEMA has people they train and call up for duty when a disaster strikes. For the most part they aren’t in this position for a big paycheck (since there isn’t one) but because they care in some way.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to figure out what the reaction of a citizen would be when told the home they valued at half a million dollars isn’t worth that. Or that the real Mona Lisa is still hanging in the Louvre, and wasn’t in his living room when his house went up in flames. Throw a camera on them right after they receive this news and the fireworks start.

Within days of arriving FEMA could do no right, and this was years before Katrina. Short of handing out blank checks, which probably would have gotten them headlines of wasting of government funds, nothing they did was good enough. There was always someone ready to complain and a news crew ready to amplify their complaint into a statewide crisis.

Are we that fascinated by bad news? We’ve all seen people slow down for crash scenes, creeping by the wreckage hoping for a glimpse of something morbid and memorable. The media seems to think we crave it, once they find a thread to start tearing at the beatings continue right up until some celebrity debutante forgets her panties. Just like that it’s over. Old news. Not even worth back page space.

Forget that FEMA spent countless hours processing every claim in an old bank building until everyone had theirs processed. Forget the things that needed to be addressed before the next set of fires. The Marines are always first to volunteer to assist, but are turned down every time because they haven’t been ‘trained’. It takes a lot of training to drive a truck or aid in evacuations. Forget the fact that people took their money and went and rebuilt bigger and more expensive houses right in the same canyon that burns out every time. Naturally they all become ardent conservationists and refuse to let the brush be cleared because it might endanger the spotted cockroach or something.

Today it seems journalists think responsible news reporting consists of finding something wrong, spreading hate and discontent, and moving on before anyone has a chance to see if they are right. The ‘Shock and Awe’ version of reporting. And we are eating it up, and asking for more.