I pray for the sake of my family home (if it still exists) that the wind relents. But this disaster is not about the wind.

(images are by Steve Engelmann, maps by CalFire, words by me)

How do we resist narratives of neighbourhoods where “millionaires are getting a taste of the apocalyptic movies they produced and acted in” to to see the marginalised, differently abled, and elderly,, whose narratives of ‘escape’, or simply survival, are far less appealing to a media elite?

How do we talk about the fact that the logic that pumps money into LAPD and enlists hundreds of incarcerated peoples to fight an uncontainable fire for $4 per day is the very same logic that sends arms to Israel as it burns entire cities and perpetuates another prison?

As we blame the wind, how can we have a conversation about the extractive legacies of water stealing, draining and rerouting? Or fire suppression tactics that make the world more flammable? Or centuries of encroachment on more and more arid land?

The Santa Ana winds may be dry, originating from the Great Basin. These winds may increase static electricity and produce ‘strange luminosities’ in the sky. Yet being affected by a dry wind is not the same as codifying it with ‘demonic’ fears. In demonising wind, whose demonic actions go unnoticed?

Whose wind is this? Who remembers its names? Who is willing to counter the ‘blame’ with the knowledge that the ‘Santa Ana’ wind has a cultural history 5,000 years old in the lifeways of Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples, on whose land Los Angeles was settled and built?

Blame it on the #wind: blame it on the ‘devil’s wind’ that gusts over #LosAngeles at 60+ mph, ‘fanning the flame’ of five ongoing, devastating #wildfires, as yet ‘uncontained’.

Blame it on the wind, an unpredictable, invisible, seemingly chaotic, uncontrollable force: the easiest scapegoat.