Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Children and families gather at the road block on Highway One in Santa Cruz begging the state for more resources to fight the CZULightningComplex Fire.
Here’s what you need to understand: these kids shouldn’t be here.
They should be doing whatever the hell kids do in August in California,swimming, complaining about being bored, eating ice cream that drips down their arms in the oppressive heat. Instead, they’re standing on Highway 1 with hand-painted signs, their small voices trying to cut through the smoke and the bureaucratic indifference, begging the state to save their homes. To save their neighbors. To give a damn.
Let that sink in for a second. Children. Begging.
The CZU Lightning Complex Fire wasn’t some distant abstraction you read about in a headline before scrolling to the next catastrophe. It was real. It consumed homes, memories, entire communities in the Santa Cruz mountains. And while the flames were doing their work, these kids, who had already lost so much, who had already breathed in more ash than any human being should, they figured out that nobody was coming to help. Not fast enough. Not with enough resources. Not with the urgency that a goddamn inferno demands.
So they did what the adults couldn’t or wouldn’t do. They showed up. They made signs. They stood at that roadblock and made themselves impossible to ignore.
Of course their parents helped them. You think a seven-year-old organizes a highway protest on their own? But here’s the thing: that makes it worse, not better. Those parents were so desperate, so utterly abandoned by the system that’s supposed to protect them, that they brought their children to stand on a highway and beg for help. Think about what it takes to get to that point. The conversations that happened in those homes, assuming those homes were still standing, where mom or dad had to explain to their kid why they needed to come hold fucking a sign by the side of the road. Why the firefighters didn’t have enough resources. Why the state wasn’t doing more.
That’s not cynical theater. That’s defeat and defiance happening at the same time.
The quote from The Little Prince says it all: “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” Yeah. Tiresome. That’s one word for it. Heartbreaking is another. Obscene is a third.
These kids weren’t asking for anything unreasonable. They were asking for basic competence. For resources. For the state to protect its people when they’re quite literally on fire. And the fact that they had to ask, that they had to plead, tells you everything you need to know about who matters and who doesn’t in the calculus of disaster response.
Maybe some parent helped a kid spell “Please Help Us” correctly. Maybe they drove them there. Maybe they stood behind them, equally powerless, hoping that the image of children pleading would finally move someone to act where everything else had failed. Because when you’re watching your community burn and the response is inadequate, you use whatever leverage you have. Even if that means putting your kids on the front line of your desperation.
We failed them. We fail them every time we make them explain to us why their lives matter, why their homes matter, why their communities deserve the same protection we’d mobilize in a heartbeat for wealthier, more connected neighborhoods. They shouldn’t have to teach us humanity. They shouldn’t have to stand on a highway and beg the state to do its fucking job.
But here we are.