The Fire

It's funny how you can learn new things.

About 20 years ago in Northwest Atlanta, an apartment building burned flat. It was December, and the area was experiencing a cold snap. One man was especially cold because he hadn't paid his power bill and his heat was shut off. He had one heat source: a barbecue grill that sat outside on his balcony. He dragged it into the living room, tossed in half a bag of charcoal briquettes, and lit it. He was reasonably warm and comfortable for part of the night. 

But then something happened. Perhaps the man got too close to the grill and tripped, or he kicked it in his sleep, or maybe a dog ran through the room too fast. Regardless, what happened was that the grill turned over. In a matter of seconds, the rug had caught fire. And the curtains, and the couch, and the walls, and the ceiling. The building had apartment units on both sides, and there was a firewall down the center, so that if one side of the building burned, the other side would be protected. Except that the fire made its way up the roof (which was shingled, a combination both dry and oily), over the peak, and into the other side. Every unit in the building went up. A few people died, mainly the very old and disabled. Many others were badly injured and spent weeks or months recovering in the hospital. Everyone else was left with nowhere to live. The Red Cross, Salvation Army, and numerous public and private agencies, got to work trying to create a patchwork of assistance. But there were still plenty of traumatized kids and adults whose lives had been upended.  The fire happened close to Christmas. Any presents in the apartments were gone. People came out into the parking lot with the clothes they wore and little else, in some cases not even shoes or street clothes because the fire happened in the middle of the night. This was before computers were so common, and the iPhone hadn't been invented yet. Many people kept their money in their homes, and that burned along with everything else. The story was the news lead for over a week.

At work, we discussed it, and a common theme involved blaming the man who had lit the barbecue grill. There were many speculations about his intelligence level and who in their right mind would think to do such a thing. Many suggestions were raised and many who made them seemed unable to wrap their heads around the notion that the man had no electricity. Most of the people I worked with (including myself) had rarely experienced this sort of thing. They may have lost power for a few hours, or maybe a day or two, if a bad storm went through. But we were all so used to having what we needed, and seeing the worst issues resolved quickly, with lots of support from friends and family. 

This kind of blame-talk was nothing new to me. In my family, it was the norm to point a finger immediately when someone messed up. "See?" "I told you this would happen, but you never listen." "Yeah...here's some money to buy another one, and maybe you'll learn something this time - but probably not." So when people around me said that a person who lit a barbecue grill in their living room deserved to be dead/hospitalized/homeless, I nodded along, since that's what my parents would have said, too. Same for the people who kept their money in a mattress or a cookie jar instead of a bank. And the people with lots of kids but only one parent. Any inability to bounce back quickly and without help was seen as the fault of the unfortunate, who "should have" known how to plan ahead, buy insurance, and otherwise protect themselves against this sort of random catastrophe. 

At work, I sometimes had to visit the next floor up, and didn't hear blame-talk. I heard tears, and grief, and questions about how to help the fire victims. Nobody was described as stupid, or a burden on society, or someone who couldn't solve their own problems or who had created them in the first place. Because a person's intelligence level or self-sufficiency had nothing to do with factual reality in the case of this fire. The only real reality was the fact that every person in that building was now either dead, or hospitalized, or displaced.  

That was it. We learn how to think about situations from the people around us. Our parents, neighbors, friends, co-workers, teachers. I'm glad I had the opportunity to learn a different way of thinking that day. It feels better to shed tears over someone else's troubles than to look down on them and criticize them. 

It feels a lot more human.