Two families have been struggling through the pandemic. The lack of work has either laid them off, forced them to shut down their business, take a mortgage or even cancel their family’s health insurance. Someone bangs on their doors, yelling that they have to leave their houses and everything they had inside of it.
To one family, the nation lays out tents, businesses have offered free food and support and hotels open for them. Many even implored the University of Oregon to open its facilities to them. To another, the response was bleak. Those who pulled them from their houses remark, “Everybody has compassion,” but people “can’t live for free.”
The first family was evacuated. The second was evicted.
These fires have shown what humanity can look like. We must, though, examine why it chose to appear now. To do that, we must examine both family’s persecutors. The evacuated family was attacked by nature. The evicted family were attacked by other humans.
Our characterizations of both attackers and their respective victims could not be any more different. Throughout the fires, we’ve cast nature as cruel. It’s unforgiving. These fires have inundated us with endless echoes of the same message: nature does not care who you are. Together, we’ve constructed an emotional complex for nature; we’ve personified the fires just as we do when we name hurricanes. Nature is an enemy – one that opposes humanity.
Castigating nature as an enemy during these times, then, has unified individuals as they’ve shown their capacity for generosity and compassion. That unity, though, is derived from the fear that anyone’s house could burn down – the shared struggle of breathing hazardous air – that brings people together.
What happens, though, when we don’t think it will happen to us? With evictions, the cornucopia of tents and freely offered housing disappear. There is no one ready to greet them with help. Despite Kate Brown’s “noble” announcement of a rent moratorium, this particular executive action requires all payments skipped during that period to be paid back in full.
For a lot of families, this moratorium just delays the inevitable. This happens because the prevailing ideology behind evictions is that if you cannot pay rent then you deserve to be evicted. When a family gets tossed on the street, the first thing we do is seek to rationalize the individual that evicted them. We rationalize the capitalist at the expense of empathizing with the evicted.
No one extends this same logic of deserving this struggle to the fires. No one justifies the burning down of homes in rural areas, despite the fact that the representatives they purposely voted for killed a bill designed to protect them from wildfires just like this one. Should we say that they deserve to lose their home?
Of course not. It would be horrendous to justify the burning of a house regardless of circumstance. It should be equally horrendous to justify leaving a family on a street simply because of economic shortcomings. In our nation, though, it’s not.
Nature is not conscious. A fire has no selective or purposeful thought, so we do not rationalize it. But instead of treating it as a byproduct of our own waste, we treat it as capricious and cruel. But when humans, consciously, are equally cruel to other humans, we seek to rationalize them. We choose to draw lines, demarcating arbitrary notions of innocence and guilt in order to project meaning as to why a human could be so callous toward another.
In our nation, one’s ability to be productive, not your ability to be compassionate, determines whether or not you “deserve” to be relegated to a lower class of human treatment. It is why we fret over the 10,000 displaced families during the fire, but we can continue our day as 40 million lose their home permanently; when a family gets evicted, we don’t receive residual punishment like breathing the same toxic air — we don’t share their pain; so we can go on with our day, unbothered.
These fires have shown that humanity is beautiful. It’s also shown that humanity in this nation is not natural and unwavering, it is selective and exclusive. Our morality, too, is drawn along lines that could not be any further away from what it was meant to be. We cannot possibly continue to desire a world where cruelty, the abandonment or harm to any innocent family, is met with beady eyes seeking to justify it.
Suffering will always exist – it is our duty, then, to reconstruct the narrative. A universal moral premise that humans should not be victims of cruelty is corrupted if bifurcated into subclasses of the deserving and undeserving. To live up to the bare minimum standard of human decency, we must expend energy for all forms of devastation — not just the ones we worry could happen to us.
If Portland’s convention center made waves by opening for displaced fire victims, it only means it wasn’t done for the evicted and homeless before. If it is radical for an individual to seek the guarantee that every individual be entitled to the same decency and care as everyone else regardless of circumstance; we should take a moment to question the direction we are headed in.