Second Thoughts on the L.A. Fires

By Michael Pakaluk. But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, January 16th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy to head the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., the appointment of the first woman to head a Vatican dicastery, and other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel. Now for today's column... "Among mortals, second thoughts are wiser," wrote Euripides famously. Our first thought when someone suffers a loss should simply be condolence; followed by silence and a prayer. But then inevitably we arrive at second thoughts: "He didn't follow his doctor's advice. What did he expect?" "Looking at the phone while driving." "Yet another casualty of psychedelic drugs." And so on. Like everyone else, I am aghast at the loss of lives and homes in the Los Angeles fires, and I pray. But I offer some second thoughts. First, I consider that the Getty Museum provides a standard, for how prudent persons with custody of valuables should act. They value their collection; they are aware that the city government cannot be relied upon to protect it, given periodic fires fanned by the Santa Anna winds. Therefore, they have cleared their grounds of brush, installed a sprinkler system, planted water-absorbing trees all around, made their roof out of fire-resistant crushed rock, and they keep on hand a team of over 30 employees, as an ad hoc private fire-fighting team. Presumably, if they were unable to take such precautions, they would feel compelled to move their collection. Knowing what they do, if they did not move their collection, and it was destroyed, we should conclude that either they did not value the collection sufficiently, or they were imprudent, or they took a risk and suffered the consequences. A similar judgment it seems must be reached about anyone who had the means to live somewhere else but chose nonetheless to accept the risk. Didn't Our Lord warn about building houses on sand? Second, I think of envy and its daughters. Not a few people, I suspect, have secretly been delighted to learn of the destruction of the houses of celebrities and the rich in Pacific Palisades. Why else do the lists of those houses serve as clickbait? But it should not be a surprise that we delight in the misfortune of others, because our society is rife with envy - much of it going under the name of "social justice." And anyone who finds sorrow in the good fortune of the prosperous, which is envy, will take solace in the bad fortune of the prosperous. From there, as Sts. Thomas and Gregory teach, it is short step to another daughter, hatred. The word "hatred" gets abused today, love often being called hatred. We have seen little of true hatred. But keep stoking envy, and the demon face of hatred will assuredly follow. Third, I think of Bastiat's windows and World War II. Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, as you may know. showed the fallacy of people who said it was a good thing if someone's window was smashed, because that created work for the glazier. Indeed it did, Bastiat said, but do not neglect the unseen cost, the "opportunity cost," which is where the money paid to the glazier might have been otherwise productively put to work. I have not so far heard anyone foolishly celebrating the L.A. fires as a boon to the city's economy. Let's then take that wise second thought away with us and stop saying, for example, that blowing up cities in World War II was a boon to the world's economy, lifting it out of a depression. Fourth, I think yet again about World War II. "It looks like Dresden or Hiroshima," many have said spontaneously. Yes, it does, or like 100 other German and 200 other Japanese cities we firebombed. The LA fires...