The theme this week: “Paradise Lost.” The waves consuming parts of California have the character of fire. They are still out of control and totally destructive.

Did Joni Mitchell’s song come to mind: “Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got / Till it’s gone / They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot”?

Paradise, California has been leveled. People of every belief and value have been equally affected. Dozens are dead.

After such a fire, one can see for miles and miles. There is certainly clarity. There is also utter devastation.

A wildfire is fierce. It has no ambiguity. It is a positive feedback force enlarging itself to one purpose: destruction.

Righteousness and indignation are like that, with a purity born of straightforward conviction.

The U.S. isn’t paradise by any means. But neither is it Sodom or Gomorrah, so ungodly that those with God on their side need to call in lightning bolts to clear the playing field.

How can a few be so right and the rest of us so wrong that their certainty makes me the enemy?

No one who disagrees is treasonous. It speaks volumes that some are finding our fellow citizens so.

How easily some have fallen into the metaphor and cliche of war, and how misapplied.

We do not need the military to save us from a few thousand, poverty riddled and traumatized families, primarily mothers and their children, straggling toward our borders. And please, strain to be historical: President Reagan shouted a warning against revolutionary Nicaragua being days away from our borders in the 1980s. This passion to whip up fear is not new.

The military, on the other hand, is not enough to save us from the ravages and certain destruction that is climate change.

Why society in general does not bother with the far greater headcount of deaths this year from fires and hurricanes, the relentless march of a changing climate, is beyond me. Climate change or immigrants: explain the greater long-term danger to the nation in 2020, 2030, 2050.

Where is the wall to keep those waves, be they of fire or water, from our shores? Where is the clamor and leadership?