What the Fires Revealed

Jaime Ernesto Uzeta

Final Draft, January 23, 2026

 

I.

My eyes fill with tears as I stand in the middle of a boutique on Santa Monica's Montana Avenue—a store that days earlier displayed high-end designer goods, now hastily converted into a donation hub for families displaced by the Palisades fires. Crates of clothes, toiletries, and essentials form makeshift aisles. My wife is beside me. The volunteers move with grace, a kindness that seems to say: you're still part of this world. No one asks about political affiliations. The people receiving help, including us, are dazed, each trying to remember what normal felt like.

It's January 2025. We've just returned from seeing what remains of our home—a lifetime of memories and meaning made physical, reduced to a three-foot pile of ash, shorter than the crawlspace of the house that once stood there. I've spent years trying to help people in hard moments, working across media, philanthropy, government, and nonprofits—always from the side of the helper. Now I'm on the other side of the counter, and what undoes me isn't the loss of our home. It's the instinctive effort of others to make this strange, humbling moment feel less like charity and more like a shared act of care.

There's a clarity in crisis about what we owe each other. I'd felt it before - after 9/11, when that same instinct toward mutual care seemed to extend from the local to the national, when leaders spoke of shared fate and collective grief. But this time, the local generosity I was witnessing existed against a different backdrop on the national level: an environment in which disaster aid had become conditional, transactional, something to be negotiated or leveraged. The moral beauty inside that small shop was unchanged. What surrounded it was not.

This essay is an exploration of that dissonance: between what our institutions are meant to embody and what they've become, and what disasters can teach us about the difference.

 

II. What Institutions Really Are

The response to the fires was generous, but what I keep returning to is how coherent it felt across very different kinds of actions.

In the first hours after the fire, before any official updates came through, the most reliable information came from a neighbor-created WhatsApp thread. Someone posted street-by-street updates from a backyard camera. Someone else shared video from a Tesla near the canyon, watching embers shift in real time. Another neighbor began compiling a list of spare rooms for families who needed a place to land. There wasn't a plan. No one was in charge. But people stepped into roles that made sense, then adjusted as conditions changed.

When my son and I finally made it back two days later, jogging up from Santa Monica with the canyon still smoking, we ran into two women checking whether their beach-side electric scooter shop was still standing. They looked us up and down, asked where we lived, sized us up. They mentioned there had been looting in the neighborhood. After a moment, they handed us their scooters anyway.

"Just leave them locked here when you're done."

They couldn't process credit cards, and we had limited cash, so they waved off our offer. They trusted us to use the scooters—and to bring them back.

I didn't think of any of this as an "institution" at first. I thought of it as community, or decency, or people rising to the occasion. But even as it was unfolding, it was clear that what I was seeing wasn't just improvisation. It reflected a shared understanding of how people ought to treat one another.

Years ago, as an unfocused but curious college student—struck by the contrast between my father's communal ethic and a friend's inheritance of "look out for number one"—I encountered the work of Robert Bellah, a sociologist whose books on individualism and community in American life became foundational to how I understood civic obligation. Writing in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, Bellah argued that institutions aren't primarily buildings or agencies. They're the shared expectations a community reinforces through habit and repetition. A handshake is an institution in this sense: if someone extends their hand, you're expected to meet it. So too, at the other end of the spectrum, is disaster response. FEMA and its counterparts are the formal machinery through which that deeper logic—the obligation to help, the expectation of solidarity—is meant to be carried into coordinated action.

What I witnessed on the ground was disaster response at its most elemental: responsibility, reciprocity, shared obligation. The scooter women sizing us up, then choosing trust. The WhatsApp thread organizing faster than any official channel. The volunteers at that Montana Avenue boutique treating displacement with dignity. These weren't exceptions to how institutions work. They were institutions in their purest form—before scale, before bureaucracy, before political capture.

Like many people, I had come to associate institutions primarily with their formal expressions—agencies, procedures, systems. Watching these two versions of disaster response unfold side by side clarified something I hadn't fully grasped before. The formal system is only the surface. The real institution lives in the habits and expectations of ordinary people. And when those habits diverge from what leaders model at scale, you feel the fracture.

 

III. 2001 and 2025

I was living on Bleecker Street in New York when the towers fell.

One of my strongest memories isn't the day itself—though I remember that too: standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue watching the smoke, my wife wanting to flee immediately, me wanting to do something, anything. We compromised on trying to donate blood at St. Vincent's, only to be turned away because they already had too much.

What stayed with me even more was the aftermath. The smell of metal that hung in the air for weeks. FBI agents with machine guns on street corners. Everyone below 14th Street wearing masks, moving quietly. And the strange experience of emerging from the subway into Times Square, which was crowded and normal, like stepping between parallel worlds.

In the days that followed, something important became visible. The same government people had spent years criticizing as bloated or ineffective suddenly became the thing everyone was counting on—for protection, coordination, and some sense of what came next. The local fire station near our apartment had been nearly wiped out. First responders were heroes overnight.

The skepticism of that era was about government's size and competence, not its legitimacy or good faith. People debated whether institutions should do less, not whether they were working against us.

And critically, the language from national leaders matched what I was seeing locally. There was talk of shared grief, collective resolve, mutual obligation. Whatever one thought of the policies that followed, the rhetorical frame was one of common fate. The most visible voices of the nation's formal institutions modeled the same ethic of solidarity that neighbors were enacting on the ground. Local and national felt continuous.

A friend told me the news coverage of the LA fires had "almost 9/11 vibes." But the backdrop had changed. The local generosity I witnessed—the Montana Avenue volunteers, the WhatsApp coordination, the scooter women choosing trust—was as extraordinary as anything I remembered from 2001. What surrounded it was not.

This time, the language from national leadership was different. Disaster aid was framed as leverage—conditional, transactional, something to be negotiated based on political loyalty. Where 2001 had offered rhetoric of shared grief, this moment sorted Americans into those who deserved help and those who didn't. The formal institution of disaster response—embodied in both policy and rhetoric—had drifted from shared obligation toward political performance.

This is what Bellah meant when he warned that institutions drift—not suddenly, not through dramatic betrayal, but through what we tolerate, what we stop practicing, what we let become normal. The drift I sensed wasn't in any agency's logistics. It was in the national frame: the slow acceptance that solidarity itself had become conditional.

 

IV. Where Drift Comes From

So where does this kind of drift come from? Not from a sudden loss of values, and not simply because institutions are overtaken by bad actors.

More often, drift emerges gradually as institutions scale. The patterns that once aligned purpose, behavior, and responsibility become harder to sustain across distance, complexity, and time.

At their origin, institutions tend to be clear about what they are for. I saw it in that Montana Avenue boutique: people coordinating without instruction, sharing without transaction, treating strangers with dignity because that's what the moment demanded. Purpose and action were visibly aligned.

As institutions formalize and expand, that alignment becomes more fragile. Systems are built to manage volume, consistency, and risk. Rules replace judgment. Metrics stand in for meaning. What began as a way to serve a purpose becomes, over time, a way to sustain the system itself. The work continues—often successfully by external measures—even as the connection to purpose thins.

A month after the fire, amid everything else, I found myself at the DMV to renew a vehicle registration. The stakes were trivial by comparison — but the pattern wasn't. The notice the agency had mailed had burned with the house. The clerk was kind, but the rules allowed little flexibility. The system didn't have a setting for loss. Only when a supervisor stepped in and exercised personal judgment did the institution's underlying purpose briefly reappear—through a person willing to act outside the script.

Institutions drift not because people inside them stop caring, but because the systems built to scale their purpose gradually decouple from it. The bureaucracy still functions, but no longer consistently reflects the norms that gave rise to it.

And then there's what drift makes possible—the kind that operated at the national level in January 2025. When leaders treat institutional roles as platforms for political performance rather than embodiments of shared obligation, they don't just fail to uphold norms. They actively reshape them. Every time disaster aid is conditioned on loyalty, and the public shrugs, the institution absorbs that permission. The formal machinery learns what we'll accept.

By stripping away intermediaries and irony and performance, disasters expose the underlying expectations that still exist—or reveal how far we've wandered from them. In crisis, you discover what your institutions actually are, because you see what people do when the scripts fall away.

 

V. The Interdependence We Forget

In the weeks and months after the fire, my family was scattered. My wife was on the East Coast, where she had started a new job. The kids were each back at their respective colleges. I stayed behind to deal with the immediate aftermath, moving between borrowed rooms and borrowed routines, relying on the generosity of friends, neighbors, and people we hadn't expected to need.

I had a modest upbringing, but I spent most of my adult life moving through the world as if I were independent, self-directed, largely self-reliant. The fire made that story harder to maintain. Almost everything that allowed us to function day to day—housing, insurance, schools, utilities, transportation—depended on systems and relationships we hadn't built ourselves and rarely thought about while they were working.

This is the uncomfortable truth disasters expose: the autonomy we prize is scaffolded by institutions we inherit and trust without noticing. Even with staggering inequities in how that scaffolding is distributed, what struck me most was how quickly it came into view once it failed. Independence, it turns out, is a permission granted by functioning systems—not a condition we achieve on our own.

Bellah observed this decades ago: the institutions that make individual freedom possible can, over time, erode our sense of obligation to sustain them. We benefit from the infrastructure of collective life while telling ourselves a story of self-reliance. And the more that story takes hold, the less we invest in the systems that made the story possible in the first place.

This is the deeper source of drift—not malice, not even neglect, but the story we tell ourselves about who we are. The myth of self-reliance blinds us to the systems we depend on. And what we can't see, we can't defend.

Living through displacement made that dynamic tangible. I wasn't just learning about interdependence as a concept. I was experiencing it as a daily reality—each borrowed room a reminder that the independence I'd taken for granted had always been a collective achievement. And collective achievements require collective attention.

 

VI. Stewardship, Not Purity

The costs of drift are no longer abstract. The gap between what we expect from institutions and what they've been shaped to deliver is no longer theoretical.

And there is a harder truth beneath that. Drift, left unaddressed, creates the conditions for something worse: capture. When norms weaken long enough, a different kind of leadership becomes possible—one that doesn't merely inherit weakened institutions but actively exploits them, that turns the gap between citizens and their institutions into a lever, that reframes shared obligation as naïveté and solidarity as weakness.

We will shape what comes next—through what we do and what we let pass. The question is whether we'll do so deliberately or by drift.

The temptation in moments like this is to reach for clean breaks—to declare the institutions failed, irredeemable, not worth defending. But the scenes that linger from the fires suggest something else. The volunteers at Montana Avenue weren't building a new system. They were enacting an old one—patterns of care and mutual obligation that have always been available when we're willing to practice them.

Stewardship rather than purity. Attention rather than ideology.

The patterns that re-emerge in crisis—care without transaction, responsibility without attribution, coordination without spectacle—aren't radical innovations. They're familiar. Fragile. And still widely understood. They remind us what the institutions were for in the first place—and what we stand to lose if we forget.

 

VII.

I keep coming back to the walk with my son, jogging up from Santa Monica, past the emergency staging areas and the press tents and the planes pulling water from the ocean. He's an Eagle Scout. We've done backcountry trips together in Alaska and Yosemite. But this one felt different.

By the time we reached the canyon, I wasn't sure we were in the right place until we recognized the gate of a lone ranch at the base. Someone was on the roof of the stable, spraying water on the building and the ground around it. When we climbed up to our street, there were no landmarks left. Just chimneys—blocks and blocks of chimneys, some areas still smoldering.

On our lot, everything that had represented something—the years of building a life in that house, the artifacts of a family's history—had been reduced to ash.

And yet what stays with me isn't only the devastation. It's the scooter women who trusted us. The WhatsApp thread that organized faster than any official channel. The volunteers who made a boutique feel like a sanctuary. The neighbors from our loop who still meet at a park, even though there is no loop anymore.

Those patterns were always there. The fire just made them visible.

Bellah believed that institutions are not separate from us—they are us, formalized. The patterns we practice become the systems we inherit. And if drift is cumulative—built from countless small tolerances, each one easy to rationalize—then so is repair. Not through a single dramatic correction, but through what we're willing to notice, name, and refuse to normalize.

That may feel inadequate to the scale of the moment. Perhaps it is. But the alternative—waiting for someone else to fix it, or concluding that nothing can be done—is its own form of permission. What I've been left with since is a question that feels less abstract the longer I sit with it:

What am I tolerating now that I wouldn't tolerate if the stakes were visible?

 

Sources & Acknowledgments

This essay was informed by classic and contemporary writing on civic life and democratic institutions, including Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the work of Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton in Habits of the Heart and The Good Society.

It is also shaped by lived experience during the Los Angeles wildfires and by conversations with neighbors, volunteers, and practitioners involved in response and recovery.