My heart has ached all week for the people of Montecito. The rising death toll, the massive amounts of homes lost and infrastructure damaged, and the ongoing search to find the remaining missing have reminded us all, every day, that our communities are vulnerable.
I’m not here to scare anyone but to inform and remind of a brutal truth, so that everyone considers the risks with sober eyes. Do you have a disaster plan ready? Do you have emergency kits? Do you have food, water, and other supplies ready to go during an evacuation?
I’ve always felt comfortable that if I flapped my wings, I could get out of any situation. I’m not so confident these days, and having a solid plan and being prepared feels like something that’s essential for all of us. Plenty of people left Montecito after the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office evacuation order was issued the day before the storm, but others didn’t, proving how serious those orders are.
But locals shouldn’t just get prepared, they need to stay connected! How many of us actually follow Santa Barbara County or its Office of Emergency Management (OEM) on social media? The answer is not enough. They’re at @countyofsb and @SBCountyOEM on Twitter.
Everyone should be prepared to respond to an emergency. Americans have progressively lost their sense of civic duty over the past few generations. The sense of responsibility that people felt for each other, being informed, and being active in representative government has gone the way of the dodo, it seems.
That’s what newspapers are good for: Stay informed in the news section and argue public policy in the opinion section, that’s how our democracy has operated since it was founded.
Americans also used to know the difference between the news and opinion sections, unlike our prolific letter writer from Lompoc, Justin Ruhge, who called the Sun a “tabloid” reeking of “liberal bias” in a letter he wrote us this week (page 15). Why is Ruhge mad at us, again? Well, because we ran an opinion piece by somebody he disagrees with, Ken McCalip (“Trump’s bluster makes U.S. unsafe,” Jan. 11). We’re never a tabloid when we run his letters, of course.
More Americans also used to know the difference between fact and fiction. Everyone has a responsibility to question the claims they read. For instance, Ruhge said former President Barack Obama is an “anti-American racist,” and has defended Donald Trump at just about every turn in his presidency. If I even mention Trump’s recent “shithole countries” comment, it’s easy to predict his dismissal as “fake news.”
I’ve read Ruhge’s letters for years, and noticed a troubling change in his rhetoric ever since Trump came around. Everyone is a “radical Democrat” now, according to Ruhge, and nobody knows anything about how to run the country, other than a scandalous former reality TV star/casino baron with no civic or political experience. And if you think otherwise, well, it must have something to do with Hillary Clinton!
If the United States and its people are to survive things as dangerous as natural disasters on a warming planet, a possible nuclear attack, or another economic downturn, we need to be able to agree on the truth of our situation, not cynically bully each other over ideology. We don’t need to be friends, but we can at least meet on the common ground of fact.
The Canary isn’t here to make friends. Send your thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 18-25, 2018.
