Starting your life all over again?

Now that Mother Nature is helping man beat back those disastrous fires in California, it’s a prudent time to address two matters related to the cause and effect of these fires.

First, the news coverage. If I hear one more blond talking-head, so-called journalist talk about people “losing everything they had,” I’m going to pull out my remaining three hairs. Can we leave the cliches alone for a while? Except for the tragic deaths associated with the fires – and we’ll get to those in a moment – these people didn’t “lose everything they had.” They aren’t “going to have to start their lives all over again.”

Come on folks, let’s get a grip here. These were fires. People lost stuff. They lost furniture, stereos, clothes, appliances, jewelry and pictures of grandma. Except for the pictures of grandma, the stuff can and will be replaced, in many cases with money handed to the prudent ones who carried adequate insurance.

I had a friend who, 25 years ago, had his house burn down. He lost a lot of stuff. At that very same time, his son was winning a battle with cancer. This family had their priorities straight. They knew that the fire was but a small bump on their life’s journey. There isn’t a person reading these words who wouldn’t take a nice roaring house fire over a family member with cancer any day of the week. For many, the loss of a pet would be more tragic than the loss of their stuff in a fire.

And what, please, is this nonsense about “starting their lives all over again”? Is this phrase on the final exam of the nation’s premiere journalism schools? Is there some subsection to some code of journalistic ethics that requires a television reporter to stare stupidly into a camera and announce to the audience that Cranston and Marie Snord, who just lost their home in this fire you see behind me, will begin their lives all over again starting at 7:30 tomorrow morning?

Does that mean that Cranston and Marie will be rendered speechless and unable to care for themselves after the fire? Will they be sucking on a bottle on one end and making deposits into a disposable diaper on the other? Who is going to come along and teach them to crawl, and then to walk?

And what about talking? Are we going to have to wait 14 months before they start repeating some basic words again? You know, this starting life all over again can be a real pain, especially that teething thing. There is, though, the tremendous sense of accomplishment that comes with mastering the porcelain god.

Look … I’m not making light of the loss these people are facing, but there are people out there who are coping with difficulties and challenges that make the loss of one’s stuff in a house-fire but a minor inconvenience. Let’s just try to maintain our perspective a bit.

One more thing about the fires … more particularly the Cedar fire outside of San Diego. You do know that this fire was first discovered around 5:30 one evening by a helicopter pilot, don’t you? At the time the Cedar fire was first discovered it was about half the size of a football field.

Within minutes, another helicopter with a bucket of firefighting slurry slung underneath was on the way to douse this young blazing upstart. That’s when government bureaucracy got in the way. That helicopter was a mere five minutes from the Cedar fire when it was called back. There was some sort of regulation on the books in California which stated that aircraft could not be used to attack a fire within 30 minutes of sundown. Sundown was about 20 minutes away, so the helicopter was called back.

Firefighters feel certain that the Cedar fire could have been contained within an hour or so with the help of that one helicopter dump. But, thanks to the workings of government bureaucracy, that fire grew overnight to become the largest brushfire in the history of the state of California – and a murderous one. It killed over 13 people.

Pay attention to this, my friends, for this is the way government makes life-or-death decisions. The rules said no aircraft fighting fires after 30 minutes before sundown. The rules are followed, people die and hundreds of homes are lost.

Right now, the American people are clamoring for more government involvement in their health care. Consider, please, the demonstrated decision-making abilities of government. When it’s your life instead of a mountainside of brush that is threatened by disaster, do you want government making the decisions on how the threat is to be fought?