How do you love your neighbors when your houses are on fire?

Related: How do you love your neighbors long before your houses are on fire?

All morning long, with other work piling up around me, I kept returning to the spreadsheet. It is both beautiful and hope giving and not nearly enough. It’s already fuller than when I first started looking at it, but I know that it would need to be exponentially fuller in order to meet the needs of a city of millions. It is packed with names and addresses that aren’t familiar to me. Southern California addresses. Not a place I’ve ever lived, though it’s home to many people I love. Not a place I’ve ever lived, but under threat from a force that myself and anybody raised in the forested West understands innately. Not a place that I’ve ever lived, but a place— like all places— to which I’m connected.

This week, Los Angeles is on fire, but this essay could be written about so many fires, floods, mudslides and hurricanes— both past and future tense. There are so many people talking nonsense— in this case about DEI hires and how wokeness drained the water supply and decimated the fire brigade. One of the people talking nonsense is a billionaire who recently ran for mayor, a man who made his fortune building malls that offer a simulacra of walkable, livable community but whose real purpose is profit. The billionaire has been busy this week— he hired a private firefighting force to protect one of his malls.

The people who are spouting nonsense do not love their neighbors. They love money and fame and the clout that can be amassed by appealing to other human beings’ fears. I have been trying not to give them much attention, not because their lies aren’t impactful, but because after the first few hundred fact checks, it’s easy to buy the myth that all that is required of us, at a moment like this, is pointing out that the nonsense-spouters are in fact spouting nonsense.

There are also— in this and every other moment like this— plenty of people sharing important truths. They are reminding us that the fires and floods and hurricanes have been and will be made worse by climate change, that our ability to respond to them is hindered by decimated public budgets and dwindling social safety nets, that there are root causes here that, if not addressed, will come for us all.

I appreciate those voices, both in these noisy moments and in the quieter ones, when they are told that their opinions are quixotic and “out of step with public opinion.” We should always act with an awareness of how we got here. We should always help one another connect the dots.

I love the truth-tellers, but I also know that truth-telling, in a world of isolation and disconnection and immense need, is not enough.

And that’s why I love the spreadsheet. Again, it is a small thing, not expansive enough to cover an entire metro area’s worth of needs, but it is gorgeous. At a time when the term “mutual aid” has often become merely a euphemism for “fundraiser,” it actually delivers on the spirit of that nom de la Solidarité. Scrolling through its rows and columns, you will see institutions and people who are offering resources, as well as specific asks for help. Where is food being given out? Where can you take food if you have it? Who could use a translator? Who is boarding animals? What do you need? What can you give? It’s all there.

The reason why that spreadsheet exists in the first place is because organizers with Mutual Aid LA have been building and connecting together long before this immediate crisis. For multiple years now, a network of over 100 community groups across the region have been doing the quiet, tireless work of stitching together relationships of care in a city often known for its atomization and inhospitality towards its most vulnerable residents. Why have they been able to respond in this moment? Because long before this week, they were bringing neighbors together for events like regular produce giveaways in city parks and water drop-offs on Skid Row. They’ve been organizing tenant unions and neighborhood trash clean-ups. They’ve been tending to community gardens and bike co-ops.

Key also to mutual aid— while these efforts have always been about providing support directly to neighbors who need them, their work has not been about charity divorced from agitation and structural critique. Just as Los Angeles would be much better able to weather this current crisis in a world where it funded its public services adequately and didn’t have billionaires siphoning off its water supply, so too would there be no need for grassroots activists feeding neighbors directly if the city’s government and budget were aligned towards the needs of working people rather than the wealthy and powerful. There should never be a dichotomy between care and activism. Protesting city hall and building community with neighbors can and need to be done together. One effort informs the other. That’s how the actual human heart works— a dance between the atria and the ventricles. It’s no wonder that metaphorical heart work relies on a similar dance. It’s no wonder that the heart is a muscle the size of a fist.

I have no doubt that lives will be saved in Los Angeles this week because of the connections that neighbors made to each other months and years ago. That’s the glorious, blessed news. The tragedy, of course, is that all this existing neighborliness won’t be enough for the enormity of needs that region will face.

And so, in this moment, especially those of us who are physically distant from Los Angeles, our work is two-fold. If there’s anything we can do to buoy those holding the threads of care together in that place, let us do so. But also, let us remember, wherever we live, that this moment is very likely to come our way as well. It may not be a fire. It may be a blizzard or an earthquake or a collapsed bridge. And in that moment, we too will be called to be neighbors. And goodness I hope we step up. But even more so, I hope that we are better able to do so because we have already been tending and plowing and watering the seeds of community long before the flames and waves come our way. We can keep each other safe, but only if we are truly a we to each other in the first place.

With love today, for Los Angeles, and love for all the places we live, in every moment. Let us be connected right now, and let us remember our connections when the flames subside.

End notes:

1. Here are all the links to the great work that LA Mutual Aid is doing, both this week and every week. I sent a donation their way, and encourage you to do so as well.

2. Here is a great compendium of resources on how to start a mutual aid effort in your community. The first step, of course, is to learn who around you might already be doing that work and how you can plug in. I recommend the Mutual Aid Hub as a great place to start there.

3. Please feel free to use the comments to share resources that folks should know about— especially in LA, but also across the country. We can do too things at once— respond to moments of acute need, while also strengthening good work everywhere.

4. An offering related to this topic: The next set of (free! virtual!) Barnraisers trainings (coming your way late February-early March, dates TBD) will be about how to build and sustain a community group. Info coming very soon, so if you haven’t joined the interest list, please do so. These will be a lot of fun and (I hope) very useful. Thanks also to everybody who has become a paid subscriber to this newsletter- your contribution is what enables me to keep these trainings free to all.