oYour home was burned On January 7, the Palisade fire. After such a disaster, the feeling of grief and displacement will never disappear, but the consequences of dealing with them are omnipresent. My wife and I have a lot to do: meet with insurance companies, city agencies and lawyers; visit a lot of things we burned to oversee the removal of debris; hire engineers and architects to determine the condition of our foundation and the prospect of reconstruction.
The bureaucratic details that fill our days are overwhelming, frustratingly mediocre, yet laborious and complex. As a bonus, we found that an attorney messed up our trust arrangement five years ago, which meant that, among all the other things, we had to go on a series of trips to the county clerk’s office just to prove that the house that no longer exists actually belongs to us. I would be angry with the lawyer, but his home and office were burned down.
About a week after the fire, insurance companies, city institutions, and county clerks all sympathized with it. Even the barista at the coffee shop offers free lattes. This generous man disappeared, leaving us and all others who lost their home or business in the control bureaucracy of companies and government bureaucracies that were the same fatigue as the fire survivors I dealt with. At its best, building in the Pacific Palisades is complicated and expensive. Licensing is always a nightmare, contractors always seem to charge premiums, and insurance is already hard to obtain. Now, everything is becoming increasingly expensive and difficult with the upcoming tariffs on building materials and the possible impact of mass evictions on the immigration labor that many subcontractors rely on.
sUntil my wife and I Love our house. We enjoyed the views of the modern Spanish in 2022 and thought it was the house we lived in throughout our lives. So, after the fire, we immediately made up our minds to rebuild. Even if we are underinsured, we are lucky. We have almost lost all of our possessions except the house - if I remember to remember to list them as insurance companies, but could also list them, but replace most of them, but also list them as objects of sensual value, especially inherited artworks, which will be lost forever. But we believe that if we keep working hard every day, we can rebuild our lives here. We love our town.
Then, Donald Trump took office.
I don't need to join him many of his executive orders and policies, which makes me question what America is becoming, but they do make us wonder about the wisdom of spending all the time, energy and money on rebuilding a house here. The country is becoming increasingly difficult and even more terrifying, with the leadership's ruling party seemingly cruel and powerless, with the support of about half of the population. Their vision for America is completely inconsistent with the vision we believe in.
Some of our friends, people who donate and call for Democrats, said they no longer focus on news or politics. Another person keeps reporting on Trump’s illegal behavior as a clickbait for liberals. In other words, they are looking for ways to deal with it by disengagement. But when I made the mistake of logging in to social media or watching Fox News, that possible authoritarian among us seemed to have unlimited energy and doubled enthusiasm.
I'm not imagining that I'll end up on some undesirable list. I have been a TV writer and producer for the past decade, and before that, my record as a journalist and novelist was unlikely to make me the target of Trump’s retribution. But how many of us are guessing these things? Will posting this add my name to some ledgers of the National Enemy? I was shocked by the fact that I even did the calculations. Now, my wife and I are combining this anxiety, depression, with our years of life in the prospect of rebuilding in a country we don’t want to live in, and maybe even want us here. Is that wise? This is the problem in our minds.
For now, here’s the answer we came up with: We no longer believe we can own a dream house in Trump’s America. The fire forced us to rethink everything. Then, the growing authoritarianism led us to decide to move to Spain.
My wife and our daughter have German passports, allowing them to settle in another EU country; as a spouse, I can somehow secure the EU's residency. We were lucky enough to find rental homes in the areas we are familiar with while we are looking for a new, more permanent home. I know what this might sound like: I know that even having this choice is a privilege, and many Americans with similar fears, perhaps better reasons, and neither. But throwing your home and almost everything you have to the huge fire is not exactly the beginning of a winning streak.
oneTA practical levelready to take this international move means more homework, a range of different daily actions, and driving in new bureaucracies and Spanish lawyers, while Spain is even a more legitimate society than ourselves. But the arduous task of moving to Spain is not only easier to manage, but also more cautious and more active than the arduous task of reconstruction after the fire. Instead of rebuilding our modern Spanish right away, it makes sense to move to modern times SpainWe can get rid of Trump's chaos there, from abroad. While we are more optimistic about the outlook for the United States, we still plan to rebuild our homes in Palisades one day.
I know, I'm working on it - maybe if we still own the house intact, we might be willing to stay and have this defined battle on the American experiment. Maybe we are doing the geographic version of our friends instead of reading the news from abroad and ignoring the news. Building a house is hard work. We've done this work before - it's one of the most challenging projects home has ever had. But building a house is different from building a house.
The fire took our house away. But it is the Trump administration that could be destroying our homes. My favorite wish is to be proven wrong and will be rebuilt soon.