|
By Jesse Alexander
April 17, 2011
Readings
“Whether the response is coming from local or state officials—or
both—most emergency management agencies and government plans assume
it may take 24 to 72 hours to get assistance to individuals,
particularly those who remain in affected areas. Consequently,
successful emergency management can, in part, depend on individuals’
[…] preparedness to survive independently for the 24 to 72 hours
that responders expect it will take to first deliver assistance.”
From “A FAILURE OF INITIATIVE Final Report of the Select Bipartisan
Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to
Hurricane Katrina U.S. House of Representatives
"After a major disaster the usual services we take for granted, such
as running water, refrigeration, and telephones, may be unavailable.
Experts recommend that you should be prepared to be self-sufficient
for at least three days. Store your household disaster kit in an
easily accessible location. Put contents in a large, watertight
container (e.g. a large plastic garbage can with a lid and wheels)
that you can move easily.” from www.72hours.org
“Imagine we live on a planet. Not our Cozy, taken-for-granted earth,
but a planet, a real one, with melting poles and dying forests and a
heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched
by heat. An inhospitable place. “ From Eaarth by Bill McKibben
Introduction
Personal story
It was a relatively fine fall day. I had just completed my morning
walk through my home town of Montclair, NJ, and I had settled down
for yet another round of job searching on-line when the phone rang.
When I answered it, my friend, Brenda Brown said, "I guess, I dodged
a bullet?” When I asked what she meant. She sighed, paused and said,
"turn on the TV...any channel." and hung up.
She had been on a Path train to New York on the morning of Sept 11,
2001. The train had stopped just before the Journal Square station
and she and all the passengers saw the second plane hit the World
Trade Tower. At that same instant, another friend from high school,
Mark Reynolds heard the scream of jets revving and looked up just in
time to see the plane hit the building he had just left.
They were both lucky—they are both alive, but they knew, as we all
did, that our world had changed.
On that day, I reached for my amateur radio gear and started my
journey into the volunteer work of emergency communications. I
upgraded Amateur radio license, joined the Amateur Radio Emergency
Service, and I recently became part of the Clinton Community
Emergency Response Team (CERT) in Prince Georges County.
I had another “Santa-Claus-is-not-coming-this-Christmas” moment
right here in this church during Joelle Novey’s sermon. I was
sitting behind her listening and watching your faces as she
described the new Eaarth.
Watching your expressions as I listened to her words had a greater
impact on me than Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” I felt the
truth, that the world of my youth was no more, in my stomach. There
was a new normal, a new Eaarth.
Stuff is not the solution
As I learned more about emergency response, I began to be
increasingly troubled by the "stuff" approach sold by many of the
relief agencies in the media. The storyline seemed to be, "if you
want to survive a disaster, go shopping", "if you want to be a
better volunteer, buy more stuff”
I'm not arguing that people should not make grab-and-go bags or make
plans about how to survive the aftermath of a disaster, but what I
am saying is that planning to survive on your own stuff without
thinking about your community is not the answer.
Remember the Twilight Zone episode “The Shelter”? In this episode,
the neighbors almost destroy a bomb shelter and come very close to
killing the family that built it during what they thought was an
impending disaster. In the end, they discover that the most valuable
thing lost was their sense of community—not the wrecked object: the
shelter.
We cannot proceed into life on the new planet without a community.
None of us will have ever enough stuff to survive individually.
Remember the disaster scenario of Y2K:
"Poor people from the inner cities, angry at the software developers
whose bad software lead to the failure of the computers on 1/1/2000
that ran the power plants and water systems; would go out to the
suburbs to seek revenge on the poor nerds that caused the problem."
Many of you may also remember the stories of software developers
stockpiling MREs and water—not to mention guns and plenty of ammo.
As it turned out, many the computers that ran the public services
were too dumb to care about what year it was, and the few that did
were fixed. There were a few isolated failures of some systems
(curiously there were some rumored failures in sophisticated
military surveillance satellites), but the power stayed on, the
water flowed, wall street ticked and hummed, and the frightened
nerds were safe but stuck with all their survival stuff.
Something else happened during the Y2K debate. Some people began to
take a different approach, a more progressive approach. UTNE Reader
published “Y2K Citizen’s Action Guide”. I still have a copy. It
advocates a people-first approach in “Turning to one another” on
page 19:
“As people engage with one another—even as they develop terrorizing
information—they develop relationships that enable them to encounter
the unknown together, and they develop much greater collective
intelligence.”
Stuff will not save us. Can we be secure in our warm, solar powered,
battery backed up homes while our neighbors suffer in the cold and
darkness? Indeed, can our nation be safe while people in other
nations starve, die, or watch their homelands fry, or flood because
of climate change—that we are in large part responsible for.
We need a more progressive approach. We need a different kind of
go-kit; we need a spiritual go-kit.
The four items in your spiritual go-kit
Here are the four things I believe belong in that new spiritual,
communal go-kit: compassion, creativity, courage, and faith.
This is by no means a complete list—just as the disclaimer on the
physical go-kits suggest. This list is just a start. Please exercise
your creativity and add more, modify those that I have added, or
disregard those that you believe do not apply. And, as usual, I
would do well to follow my own advise.
Compassion
Compassion is the first tool we must have in our communal go-kit to
survive on this new, increasingly hostile planet.
I took the Community Emergency Response Team course this February.
In one part of the course, we were learning about the psychological
aspects of survival. A woman who indicated that she was originally
from Texas recounted a harrowing story that happened during the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She indicated that she had worked
with a girl who had watched her cousin drown in the rushing
floodwater.
As she spoke, I imagined the horror that this young girl must have
felt trying desperately to hold on to her younger cousin; losing her
grip in the strong waters, and watching her family member get swept
under and away by the rushing water.
However, that was not the saddest part of the story. According to my
classmate, the young girl had to deal with her aunt's blame for
causing her cousin's death.
Please understand me. I'm not prepared to debate with you about
whether or not Katrina was caused by climate change. If that's what
you're thinking about then you've missed my point entirely.
What is not debatable is that climate change will lead to violent
weather; which in turn will cause more frequent droughts and floods;
which may, unfortunately, lead to blame, violence, and death.
What is not debatable is that there will be more children (and
adults) that will need some compassionate someone to comfort them,
feed and clothe them, or harbor them, and say “it's not your fault”
or “I'm so happy that you survived!”
Why shouldn't we prepare ourselves to offer something different from
the usual hording, blaming, and victimization? Why shouldn’t we
offer compassion?
We can always increase our supply of compassion by practicing on the
people we love and work with right now! Let's commit to practicing
compassion while we are relatively safe in this small time and space
between disasters.
Please practice compassion now so that it will be ready for use in
your spiritual go-kit.
Creativity
Creativity will be the most important currency on the new Eaarth, it
will be an essential part of your spiritual go-kit—not only because
you will need to trade it for the essentials of your life (food
clothing shelter, clean air, water, etc.) but because you will need
it as a means of survival.
During a recent Democracy Now interview, Dr. Michio Kaku argues that
we are entering an economy that will be based on creativity instead
of commodities. He comes to this conclusion because he believes that
creativity is all that will be left for us after robots take over
all the repetitive and therefore “commodified” tasks.
While I agree with his conclusion that creativity will be the key
currency on the new Eaarth, I believe that for most people in the
world creativity has always been the chief currency and that this is
nothing new.
As the African proverb says “if you can talk you can sing, if you
can walk you can dance.” When we are not so stuff-centered we can
learn to rely on those things that come from our humanity, our
spirits.
Indeed, most of the current struggles—from climate change to the
national budget—center on the management of creativity.
Creativity is also a means of survival. In the book” The
Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why” by Amanda
Ripley we learn about Rick Rescorla, a Vietnam veteran who became a
security officer for Morgan Stanley. Mr. Rescorla, we learn, sang
Cornish war songs to employees to keep them focused as they as they
evacuated though the crowded stairwells of the World Trade Tower
during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He successfully evacuated most of
the employees only to die himself when he returned to evacuate more
people.
Mr. Rescorla's songs were songs of survival.
We will need songs to awaken us from fear-induced paralysis so that
we can escape, stand up for our rights, build a community solar
power plant, or fight for our survival. We will need stories teach
the children about how to outsmart powerful foes and how their
ancestors survived adversity. We will need pictures drawn in sand or
spray-painted on the sides of buildings to tell those that come
after us, which areas are safe and which areas are dangerous. We
will need to invent games that help children learn how to care for a
community garden or survive tornadoes. We will need to create and
subvert technology to survive.
We will also need songs of calibration and art to serve as
touchstones, remembrances, and messages to future generations. I
believe it's not a coincidence that often all that's left of ancient
civilizations is their art.
Make sure Creativity is in your go-kit.
Courage
During a trip to Hawaii with Caryl, a few years back, we attended a
demonstration at the Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaii given by a
master Polynesian navigator. He talked about his work with young
people and how passing on his knowledge was not only rewarding but
helpful to children at risk--enabling them to navigate through their
own lives with courage.
However, what impressed me the most about him was that he was a man
that could never be lost. Put him anywhere on this planet and if he
could see the sky, he could find his way home—no compass, no GPS, no
maps.
He learned how to read the signs of the sky, earth, and sea as well
as those in his own body from the songs and stories of his
ancestors. Now because of his practice and his teaching, this
knowledge was as much part of him as his breath and his heart beat.
He is not alone. I remember an interview with a Somali woman who
escaped a forced marriage by walking across the desert and
eventually become an internationally known model.
The interviewer was dumbfounded by how a-matter-of-fact she was
about crossing the desert on foot without provisions or navigation
tools as an adolescent. She honestly didn’t consider this feat at
all remarkable—or brave. It was just something she knew how to do.
So what can we learn about with courage from these stories? The
message is that courage is something that can be imparted, and
developed! It's not something you're born with or some apparition
that you have to summon up. You can learn it; you can exercise it;
and it can become second nature.
I took the CERT course, Red Cross first aid, and emergency
communications courses for purely selfish reasons. I took these
courses (and I plan to take an orienteering course) so I can learn
how not to be afraid. I believe that by continuously training I will
have some idea where to take the first step in any situation life
throws at me.
I hope I never need to use my first aid training, but I feel
confident knowing what the first step is. And I know that once I can
take the first step, I am almost home.
On the new Eaarth, we will need people who know how to navigate,
administer aid, swim, and yes fight. I believe that as we gain
knowledge—even of that which could terrorize us—our fear begins to
slip away into the background noise.
On the new Eaarth, we will need to help each other develop,
exercise, and demonstrate courage.
By the way, who knows what the first thing you should do if someone
collapses?
Faith
Have you heard the story of the good Christian (or any pious or
“good” member of any religion)? Anyway, one day it began to rain in
the good Christian's area, and the National Weather Service issued a
flood warning and recommended that people evacuate and move to
higher ground. When the good Christian heard this report, he began
to pray that God would protect him. But as he prayed, it began to
rain harder.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. Opening the door, the
Christian found his neighbor, standing in the ankle-deep water with
his a 4x4 truck idling in the driveway. “C'mom!” the neighbor yells
over the sound of the storm, “Let's go! The waters' getting deeper
but we can still make it to higher ground in my truck!”
"No, no”, said the Christian, “I have faith that God will protect
me. Please leave!" The anxious neighbor reluctantly left, and the
Christian prayed.
The water got deeper and deeper—so deep in fact that the Christian
had to move upstairs to the second floor of his house.
Suddenly a group of firefighters appeared in a rowboat. “C'mon!" one
of the firefighters yelled to the Christian, “get in our boat, the
water's getting higher!”
Now what do you think that good Christian said? He said, “no, no,
no, I'll continue to pray and the Lord will protect me; I'll
survive."
Hearing calls for help from another house nearby the firefighters
reluctantly left.
The Christian prayed and the water continued to rise.
Finally, our Christian friend finds himself holding on the chimney
of his house for dear life, when a Coast Guard helicopter appeared
overhead. A member of the crew called out to the Christian through
the helicopter's megaphone: "C’mon! We'll drop the basket, get in
and we'll pull you to higher ground." You know what that good
Christian said in response, right?
Well the good Christian drowns, and he ends up in heaven—sitting on
the right hand of God. And this very dead, but very curious,
Christian turns to God and says, “Master, I prayed and I prayed. Why
didn't you save me?”
And God said “Dude! Give me a break! I totally answered every
prayer! I sent you a neighbor with a 4x4, a bunch of firefighters in
a rowboat; Hell, I even sent you a US Coast Guard helicopter. Do you
have any idea how expensive helicopters are?”
There are opportunities for survival all around us. What is
disparaged in political circles as “alternative power,” is a means
of survival as we face peak oil and the prospect of grid and power
plant failures caused by weather and human misbehavior.
Faith is not blind or stupid. Faith is the very fiber our spiritual
go-bag is made of! It contains the future—our collective future. It
is our affirmation; our choice to survive and our commitment to be
of service to others.
The good news is that in the midst of climate change we can choose
to survive—indeed, thrive.
Make a plan. Get a kit. Be ready.
● ● ●
|
