We Can’t Remember The Times

news cycles, rain, and forgetting

The storms are gone, the sides of roads now torn out, some hillsides still moving, still heaving thick with water. It’s nice the wind is gone, and the rains. At least for this moment it’s nice, just to have the cool air of a Bay Area winter with the sun, still so ready to warm us. It’s nice to drive on the freeway and not worry about hydroplaning. But at the same time, houses have flooded, innumerable lives changed by this collective experience that for most have been lucky enough to look at with awe, from the safety of a literally stable home. 

The other day, walking to a cafe in Pacifica, looking at the water through reeds in San Pedro creek, I saw the sidewalk beside it nearly torn away leading to the edge of a parking lot. Last week, visiting Santa Barbara, I saw a road completely stripped by the storms, and a landslide just up the road blanketing the last of the remaining asphalt. 

A Road In Montecito

I guess, put simply, what I am trying to say is that the storm is gone, but what are we to do now? Sure, we have to go about fixing the damaged roads, the sinkholes, the moldy and warped wood. But do we forget what all this water portends, the way the rest of the media has? Sure, there are other things going on, other horrific and human tragedies are happening all over the world, the country, and we talk about them because it feels important, it gives us a sense of understanding of this place to look out to these great problems and say “I know what is happening.” But we forget the recent past, and where are we left then? 

We seem to move on so quickly from what we probably should sit with, and wonder. With the storms, we might consider how prepared are we for the future, and if we can stop it. 

But we all have to pay the bills right? Money is tight and I only have so much life to live. I don’t want to be fatalistic, but the world seems to trend toward tragedy. That, or I read too much news, and not enough poetry.

As I picked up my coffee in the cafe, I sat to read a book of essays by Lucy Sante. In an essay titled “Grownups” she writes, “It may seem that nothing in the world is ever upright. It is either leaning forward, or leaning back.” Maybe this is a sentiment that seems to perfectly match these times, one that, honestly, I am having a hard time accepting. I don’t want total tragedy. I don’t think any of us do. I need hope, hope grounded in the pains of this world.

I guess I’m looking for something simple when I say hope, like listening to a group of young kids make fun of the naïveté of hippies. Hope that we are changing as a society. Hope that things might change, if not now, then soon. But maybe we’re all just rightly too busy trying to live.

We’re too busy trying to make ends meet as hedge fund managers, bankers, and oil CEOs neglect and deny their own complicity in all this mess that is killing our climate by claiming they need to accrue their wealth so they can give it charity, to be effective altruists and “help the most people for the least money” as Holden Karnofsky, executive of Open Philanthropy, said. I just have to live my life, and accept this world as tragedy, right?

Perhaps I’m worried too much by the big picture, and not enough the details in front of me — the pine lined walls of my studio, or the sunset slowly creeping in through the blinds. Maybe that’s what Tom Robbins meant when we he wrote repeatedly in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that “the International situation was desperate, as usual.”

For now, then, all I am certain of is that the rains have come and gone. The sides of roads will be replaced with more asphalt, sidewalks patched with cement, and things will continue as they are, until they cannot any longer.