Trying to find words for my feelings tonight, I have to go back to 2007. Fallbrook was on fire. We had moved our two Great Pyrenees dogs and three cats into my shop, all of us sleeping on a big blow up mattress which covered the floor. We disregarded the evacuation order and decided to go down with the ship.
All the local fire engines were fighting multiple blazes elsewhere, things looked very bleak, Fallbrook was to ultimately lose over 240 houses that night.
Around dusk we got the word that another fire was heading east from Camp Pendleton, right towards our downtown encampment. Another huge blaze was coming down the river from the east, right towards the ranch. A large blaze crossed Mission at Ranger Rd. We were trapped between multiple fires.
Around midnight we walked the block behind our shop to the Cal Fire office. If a cop had seen us we would probably be thrown out of town but we had to know our fate. We wandered in and asked if our house in the canyon still survived. The captain said that he didn't think so, that it was in the line of fire. Leslie and I asked him to send the dozers in, to try to save us but he feared it was too late. But he would try.
We wouldn't know our fate until the next day. We were one of the lucky ones, the fire eventually turned and our home was spared. America may not be so lucky.
3 comments:
There is always the Pollyanna view. After eight years of obfuscation and obstruction the Republicans own the whole enchilada. Now they have to show the country what they've got. If Mssr. Trump is the Messiah after all, then a new paradigm for US politics and policy will emerge and the Republicans will get credit for it. If Mssr. Trump is simply a gasbag and/or if his party can't work with him effectively then there are going to be a lot of serious problems and setbacks and the Republicans will have only themselves to blame. Casualties: Obamacare and Roe v. Wade. Winners: forgotten white workers. The big roulette wheel is spinning but it will take a couple of years or more to see who the ultimate winners and losers are. At worse it could be pretty bad. At best it could lead to new approaches by both parties that are badly needed to govern effectively. Sadly the result is likely to be somewhere in the middle, a giant muddle.
I am not sure that the "forgotten white workers" will necessarily be winners. Globalization may be slowed, but, a significant number of jobs will not be coming back. In recent years, more jobs have been lost to automation than to being shipped overseas. The auto companies are not going to scrap their robots in favor of manual labor. Ain't going to happen!
Some additional casualties will probably be Dodd Frank, any attempt go slow climate change, perhaps our place as the leader of the free world. Another winner: Putin.
I am surprised that the Dems are not speaking about the rigged election.... at this writing, Clinton is about 200,000 votes ahead in the popular vote nationwide. Rigged, I say, rigged!
One of the ways this could go south for Republicans would be scrapping trade agreements, causing investment to return to the US, but winding up with factories staffed by robots. Then where do the jobs come from?
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