Again with the fires

Time Lapse Test: Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

I grew up in Southern California, something I am not proud of, nor ashamed of, it just is something. One of the things I remember from my childhood was the fires. It was almost like a seasonal change, end of summer, start of school, beginning of the fire season.

As I got a bit older it became custom to look out the window at the hills of the Los Padres Forest and watch for smoke. The fires would generally come within 10 miles of my little town in the hills, but it never burned anything that was considered civilized.

The above video shows very well what it all looks like. Notice the houses? And the smoke? Nothing changes, the houses will still be there, the trees in the background will burn. A cycle continues, which is why they are cycles and not unique events.

I know the deeply disturbed, or religious, like to put more into the meaning of things like great floods or disturbing fires than truly exist, but then that is why they are deeply religious and disturbed, often in the same brain. Fires happen naturally, sometimes, and sometimes they happen because someone is irresponsible, or something else altogether. Fires happen, that much is safe to say.

Now as many people know, California is broke. The state is bordering on bankruptcy. Everyone wants to find blame, there is a fascinating story at NPR about the high cost of prisons, but that is just one problem. Back when I was a child the greedy and stupid ran a initiative that would limit the amount people would pay in property taxes. Nothing gets the electorate as hot and horny as the idea of cutting taxes, even if it meant ruining schools and damaging roads. People love to cut their taxes. People can be retarded, even on a statewide level.

So the proposition passed, of course, they always do. What were once the best schools and best public college system in the country fell on its face, so to speak. The colleges remain a joke and the public schools are damaged beyond repair. How did this happen? First, you can not get top notch anything in America without paying for it, hell it's what we always say to one another, "you get what you pay for." That is true, and it is especially true in education.

California taxpayers wanted to pay less and keep a high level of services. They also wanted those pesky criminals off the streets for a good long time. Of course, they did not want to pay for that either, they just wanted them off the streets, which were crumbling anyway because, again, cut taxes, lose services. Simple.

So, the schools falter, the prisons fill, the infrastructure crumbles and no one wants to pay more in taxes.

So, if you do not want to pay for anything, it takes a genius to figure out how to spend the money you do have. It is called priorities and everyone with a family knows how you must learn about priorities in budgeting. California pays an average of 40 thousand dollars a year per prisoner. California pays an average of 5 thousand dollars a year per student. This is called priorities. For the good people of California, it is more important to pay to keep criminals off the streets than it is to educate possible future criminals on the best way to stay out of jail. Brilliant.

I am going to get back to this point in a future blog, because there is something wrong that is deeper than greed taxpayers, locking up criminals for extended times, choking public education until it is worthless and paying for healthcare for the elderly, while letting children suffer.

In the meantime, the beautiful state of California is burning, again. I wonder if fire is like government waste. The priority is always to fight todays fire and never to prepare for tomorrows. Or possibly, and this would take brilliance, find the reason that these fires return season after season and find out a way to avoid the majority of them. In the past, when I was a child, the worst of the fires always seemed to be started by three things, someone have some sort of accident, causing sparks to ignite dry brush, a hayseed throwing a lit cigarette into the dry weeds and a dimwit leaving a camp fire burning. I am sure there were fires started by mother nature, but my memory is that accidental human failings started the majority of the fires when I was a child. Seems like there might be a solution right there. Possibly limit human contact with fire danger areas during the driest time of the year.

I am just a guy with a computer, what do I know. What I do remember, and what the above video shows, it sometimes these fires can be sexy, beautiful and inspiring in ways that seem almost pornographic.