By the time Tom Friedman sat down to write his book, the people of Lebanon had been in a state of constant war for 14 years. What they had endured, Friedman pointed out, was beyond psychological understanding. What we knew then about stress and trauma, he wrote, came from single events, such as hurricanes.

Indeed, the first "live, on location" stress/trauma studies coming out of a war were published in 2000, 11 years after Friedman's book. These involved Albanian and Serbian populations, nearly all who had experienced a series of very recent traumatic events, from fleeing their homes to the death of a loved one. Four in ten experienced mental illness. Adopting less conservative criteria doubled that number.

According to Friedman, the mental toll tends to come after the horror, not while the tragedy is still unfolding. Amazingly, while all hell is breaking loose, people tend to be resilient beyond imagination. They manage. They cope. They only fall apart later.

No one can confuse Southern California, where I now live, with Lebanon. But as I write this, three devastating fires are raging in areas ringing LA, a hundred and a bit miles north of me. A thousand people have lost their homes. The smoke blots out the sky. Armageddon hovers.

Massive fires are no longer rare events here. Last year, around this time, I vividly recall observing faint plumes of smoke from a vantage point near my home. The Santa Ana was blowing up a storm. All hell was about to break loose.

Yesterday, out on the back patio, I greeted my next door neighbor. The sky was clear. Santa Ana was sleeping. We talked about my two kittens. Right now, life is good. As for later, it's pretty clear no one wants to think about later.