Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson             Red Bluff Daily News 12/17/2024

     Water, fire: Tools, blessings, or curses?

Too little of that life-sustaining substance recalls the cowboy song about “cool, clear water” (written by Bob Nolan, popularized by Marty Robbins). It captures the lament of a parched man and his mule traveling through a wasteland, while tormented by mirages.

We observe the “drought monitor,” while mostly disconnected from the reality that those plentiful foods filling our grocery shelves must be grown somewhere. The history of human dependency on agriculture showed that starvation was only a dry year away. Now we have the displaced priorities of “water for threatened species,” like the fairly useless smelt, while some of the most productive soil in America goes fallow for lack of water allocated elsewhere (ahem, Southern California taps and golf courses).

Conversely, we see the inconvenient, even destructive results of too much water in a given place or time. Hurricane-ravaged victims back east prove that.

Our property on Saint Mary’s Avenue had a fence in the back when we moved there in 1991. Subsequently, a very wet winter saw the seasonal creek overflow its banks and undermine that fence, which we’ve never missed. The panels of fencing are still stacked back by the shed. Over decades of heat and rain, they’re probably little more than kindling, easily turned into a pyre of flames from nearby tall grasses.

While naturally unavoidable runoff from Reeds Creek has flooded adjacent homes (prompting some to be raised on pilings), aside from lightning strikes we usually only have other humans and their irresponsible actions to thank for disasters such as the Park fire, and the destruction of the Bidwell Mansion.

Initial reports from authorities used the term “warming fire.” It’s a simple phrase that translates to trespassing homeless campers starting a fire with gathered wood, in a place where a normal, responsible adult would never start it. Was that what spawned the destruction of a 159 year-old historic gem?

Odd that that phrase seems to have disappeared in subsequent reports, as the investigation into the fire’s cause proceeds; it’s said to be “unknown at this point.” I have my suspicions that there is a knee-jerk “avoidance syndrome,” a reticence to point to what could well be a likely cause. Is there an institutional bias against logical conclusions holding irresponsible homeless campers at fault?

This pattern is not without precedent as a number of fires in Southern California were quickly determined to have spread from encampments in gullies where homeless folks started fires for cooking or, yes, warming themselves.

Hardly limited to outlying wild areas, a freeway-damaging conflagration in the Bay Area had a rather obvious connection to homeless campers, their fires, and their propane tanks, under a freeway next to hundreds of wooden pallets. Authorities, to their discredit, similarly obfuscated and misdirected attention away from homeless campers’ fires.

Coincidentally, Saturday’s Daily News column, “Tales From Tehama,” cited a 1933 incident where “a shot rang out by a hobo fire in the railyard at Gerber.” It’s probably as politically incorrect to call them hobos, as it is to hold them accountable.

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As the “state” side of this column’s purview of local and state issues, California provides a never-ending supply of news items that should inform readers of what stands in the way of the best possible life we can achieve here on the “left coast,” the place where the American Dream has largely died.

An upcoming book, “Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State,” by former Brit, and American and Californian by choice, Steve Hilton, takes serous issue with the concept (endlessly espoused by Gov. Newsom) that this state is a “model for the nation.”

As its publishing date is a few months away, the substance and arguments Hilton makes will likely have an impact in media and political discussions and debate, perhaps informing legislation and policies from Sacramento to towns and counties from Southern California to Red Bluff and Tehama County.

What should be beyond dispute is that recent decades have seen the “success” of a far-left experiment, ironically fulfilling the Founders’ vision of states as laboratories of representative democracy. However, “success” in this context is defined by the supremacy of the Democrat Party and the relatively unopposed imposition of an ideology at extreme odds with those same Founders’ Constitutional norms and values.

“Great cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland collapsed into squalor as crime and homelessness were allowed to explode. The state that used to pride itself as the home of innovation and opportunity became the state with the worst rate of poverty, highest unemployment, and most hostile business climate in America—as well as the highest taxes.

“How did this happen, and what is needed to turn things around? Hilton identifies the nine key ‘pathologies’—from Elitism to Cronyism to Narcissism—that define the ideology at the heart of California's decline.” (From Amazon book review)

This is an “evergreen” topic, an unending supply of “low hanging fruit,” to be further explored.