Country on Fire
California burns, and Washington's silence is louder than the roar of the flames. The fires rage. The homes fall. The people? Abandoned by insurance companies. Ignored by their government. The people are left to sift through ash and betrayal.
This isn’t neglect; it’s policy. It’s a nation that funds wars abroad while its own people burn. Since the beginning of his term, President Biden has sent billions in aid packages to Ukraine, to Israel, to the machinery of empire. With every natural and unnatural disaster—East Palestine’s poisoned water, Maui’s smoldering ruins, the flooded streets of Florida and the Carolinas—the response has been the same: empty promises and silence. At the same time, Biden hands genociders blank checks.
In California, Indigenous knowledge that could have prevented these fires (controlled burns that kept the land in balance) was discarded long ago, criminalized, and disregarded. Instead, the forests grew thick with underbrush, dry with neglect, waiting for a spark. When the flames came, they found homes uninsured, fire crews underfunded, and government resources sent across the ocean.
The infernos were preventable. But prevention requires listening. It requires protecting your people instead of your empire.
The insurance companies left months before the fires came, their profits carefully insulated from the inevitable disaster. The government didn’t hold them accountable. It didn’t enforce the contracts that might have kept Californians secure they might rebuild. And when the flames arrived, neither the corporations nor the administration lifted a hand to help. Starved of funding, the fire departments lack the resources to fight the infernos. The aid packages were elsewhere, bound for Kyiv or Tel Aviv, while Californians watched their homes burn.
Lahaina, East Palestine, Los Angeles. The pattern is clear. If you are an American caught in a disaster, you are on your own. The administration’s priorities are written in budgets and foreign aid packages, not in the lives of its people.
In Lahaina, the flames moved faster than warnings. Generations of Native Hawaiian families who had previously experienced land theft once before watched it burn. While the ash cooled, the aid came—barely $700 per household. The same week, Biden sent billions in aid to fund an army that targets civilians.
In East Palestine, a train derailed. Toxic chemicals soaked the soil. Poisoned the air. Sickened the people. Empty promises were made. Photo ops staged. But no real aid. Instead, Biden drafted another package for Israel.
In Los Angeles, the insurance companies had already fled before the fires came. Homes burned, uninsured, and unprotected. Fire crews were stretched thin, underfunded, their resources sent abroad. There is no aid for Californians whose homes are ash, but there is always a blank check for genocide.
These cities are not just victims of disaster. They are victims of desertion. The people? Left to fend for themselves. It is cruel comfort to accept their suffering is the cost of living in a system that always looks elsewhere first.
The fires, the poison, the ash… are not acts of nature. They are acts of policy. And their victims are left with nothing but debt.
The most recent disaster does not reveal the failure of governance. It’s an abnegation of responsibility. This government does not exist to protect its citizens, nor does it ensure their safety and dignity. This government chooses wars over its people. It chooses profits over its principles. The homes in California are burning because the system was never going to protect them.
Here is the truth: your suffering is not profitable. Your loss is not strategic. Your home is just a line item, easily erased.
But this fire, like every fire, spreads. It will not stay in California. The same system that abandoned these homeowners will abandon the next and the next until nothing is left, not even a memory. The question will remain: Where was your government when you needed it most?
The answer, in every case, is somewhere else.
