Schadenfreude

I was downtown recently. On the streetcar a comment about ideas and money somehow led to a few people laughing about the fires in California.

I saw at least one of the passengers help another person, and it started a discussion about asking someone before you push their wheelchair; there were definitely caring people there. In fact, one person did point out that there are people suffering who are not rich.

Regardless, there were people very comfortable laughing at the misfortune of others.

I completely understand the temptation to laugh at James Woods. Of course, it turned out that he didn't lose his house anyway.

In fact, regardless of what losses happen -- probably including things with great sentimental value -- one of the great things about being rich is that it gives you resources for weathering losses.

As we pay more attention, though, there is a more disturbing picture.

One of the hard-hit areas is Altadena. When many other areas prevented African-American families from purchasing property, they could in Altadena. Many of the homes in that area would have represented a family's work and sacrifice to be able to own a home, part of the American dream that has been made unnecessarily hard for Black people. Those homes have been in families for generations.

Now, their ability to purchase that land at that time may indeed have meant that they were better off than some people, but that doesn't mean rich. Purchasing the land at today's prices may mean rich, but purchasing during the 40s and 60s was not the same thing.

There may be families who are not going to be able to recover from this loss.

There is a lot to be said for also caring about the air quality and the wildlife and the people on the ground fighting the fires. Many of the firefighters are prisoners who are not adequately compensated or cared for. At least one prisoner died in a different round of fire-fighting, Shawna-Lyn Jones in 2016.

No, these are not particularly dangerous, violent criminals.

(There is a book on some of this, Breathing Fire by Jaime Low, but I haven't read it yet.)

It may also be worth remembering that rich people have people they hire who could have been in real danger and may not have had great resources for evacuating.

We do know that there is one group that did not have great resources for evacuation: disabled people. 

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/disabled-people-in-fires-and-natural-disasters_l_67869984e4b0256f6fbf025b

The stories that we have been hearing have involved epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and amputation, but remember that just being elderly or having an extended illness can create obstacles where finding solutions quickly are almost impossible.

We can look back at almost any general hardship that affects wealthy white people and find that if you are not white or if you are disabled or if you are poor that you get hit harder. You get hit sooner. That is how the system works, and there is nothing funny about it.

I recently read something about schadenfreude; it just described it as taking pleasure from the misfortune of others. That was a little jarring for me because when I see examples, there is usually something that seems karmic about the suffering, "This person deserved it!"

But really, it's just pleasure in the suffering of others, making the pleasure sadism.

Maybe the point is to remember that as easy as the laughter can be, there is always more to the story. That more is probably something gross that says terrible things about humanity. 

Cheap jokes deflect the attention we should be paying to that.

It also seems worth mentioning that the pool of who gets dehumanized will always expand.