The dark orange sky, reminiscent of descriptions of what nuclear winter would be like, the smell of smoke, the rain of small hunks of grey ash raining down, the warnings about going out of the house into small particle contaminated hell have become the new normal. There are said to be 20,000 firemen on the lines. Many friends (and others) have lost their houses and possessions. But worst of all, the fires are inserting more CO2 into the atmosphere and acerbating the global warming and climate change which has made the fires worse. Why have we not treated this as an critical emergency and used every possible resource to put out the fires and change our forest management policies to minimize greenhouse gas release which contribute to global warming.
What I see is a total failure of our society to meet the challenge of near-term existential events. Our leaders barely acknowledge the problem and most people ignore it.