Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Episode two, Into the Wild Orange Yonder. For the first
three days after the shooting, you didn't talk to anyone,
and none of your friends or family seemed to know
what to say. You took off from work, cloistered yourself
away in your house, and drank. You're not sure why,
but your brain wouldn't let you listen to any of
the outreach that came your way until Aaron texted you.
(00:23):
She was a local organizer. You'd met her last year
at a protest, and she'd struck you as an unusually
outgoing person. You all barely knew each other, but when
she heard about what happened, she reached out. She offered
to put you into contact with a friend of hers, Tom,
a combat veteran who'd seen some ship overseas. She said
he might understand some of what you were going through.
You'd called him eventually, and talking to Tom had helped. Still,
(00:47):
it was two weeks after the shooting when you finally
felt good enough to leave your home. You'd pretty much
disconnected yourself from social media in the interim, and upon
diving back into the world, you were surprised to see
that everyone was freaking out over a heap home destined
to settle over your city in the coming days. No
one knew quite how hot it could get. Weatherman would
only quote a range of possible temperatures, but everyone said
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it might break the city's all time high heat record.
That same hyperbolic to you. The world was warming. You
didn't doubt that, but that heat record had held solid
since the nineteen nineties. You might have taken it all
more seriously if you hadn't been so overwhelmed with your
own ship. By the time you were semi functional again,
temperatures had already started to crest above one fifteen. During
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the heat of the day, at a hundred and eighteen degrees,
the airports started canceling certain flights. Some smaller planes, like
the Bombardier CRJ, couldn't handle those temperatures. The news assured
you that big planes, the ones made by Airbus and Boeing,
could handle up to a hundred and twenty six degrees.
There was no way it would get that hot. But
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it hit a hundred and twenty, and then the next
day it hit a hundred and twenty three, breaking the
old record for the first time in decades. More flights
were canceled, but you were doing okay. It was easy
enough to sit inside with your air conditioning and wait
out the weather. During a press conference, the city assured
everyone that the grid would hold up to the strain.
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This isn't Texas or California, the mayor assured everybody, we
can handle this. You woke up the next morning boiling
in your sheets. The power was out even in the
early morning. It was almost a hundred and ten outside.
You gulped down water, stumbled to your car, and turned
on the A C to see what the hell was
happening localized brownouts, the city, through local news assured you,
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and so you decided to pass the time in your
private A C box by driving to the gas station
to fill up your car. A lot of other people
had the same idea, though there were lines around every station.
People were filling up their cars, but also jerry cans
and even bags of gasoline. You drive around for a
few minutes, looking for any place not swarmed with customers,
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until you see your first out of gas sign. Then
you drive straight to the nearest station and wait twenty
minutes for a chance to fill up. You're one of
the last people at the station to top off. The
out of gas sign goes up just as you exit
the parking lot. On your way back home, you see
crowds of people outside the few stations that haven't run dry.
Several people are yelling at each other, fighting over access
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to the pump. You see one man waving a rifle
while another fills an enormous plastic moving crate with gasoline.
Where the hell are the cops, you wonder. The answer
to that question comes a few hours later in the day.
Without power, your office is shut down and there's little
points staying indoors where it's even hotter than outside. Aaron
reaches out and asks if you're free today. You say yes,
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and she pulls you into a signal loop where a
few dozen other folks have organized cooling stations for some
of the local homeless camps. Since you drive a hybrid
car with a big full tank, you agree to help
distribute cool water and electrolyte packets. The first couple hours
go well. You swing by a few little tent communities
where houseless people bake under shade structures and try to
cool off with wet towels and iced water bottles. Given
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the power situation, you're impressed that so many local activists
had the presence of mind to freeze water before the
heat wave. You're also impressed by the different solar arrays
you see in encampments, often wired together from battery packs
and cast off panels. Wealthier people bought to go camping
between the fans and the ice. Most of the folks
you meet seem like they'll get through the day alive.
(04:24):
In between stops, you keep checking the local news. They
aren't referring to the outages as rolling blackouts anymore. The
term grid failure has grown more and more common. Around
two p m, as temperatures crack a hundred and twenty
nine degrees, you get a notification that the airport has
canceled all flights due to a heat emergency. Earlier in
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the day, you saw several older cars pull off to
the side of the road, smoke billowing from their engines.
When you pull into your last encampment of the day,
located beneath an overpass, you see an old SOB and
two old Fords parked nearby. Their drivers and passengers are
huddled under the shade of the encampment, wet towels over
their faces, and next most of the passengers looked to
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be middle class. They're well dressed, clearly uncomfortable with the
homeless people handing them water to ward off heat stroke.
As you walk up, you hear one older woman chattering
at one of the encampment dwellers while he wets a
towel for her. I'm sorry to intrude. We went to
the store to see if we could pick up some fans,
and we just ran out of gas on the way back.
No one has fuel. We couldn't even run a generator
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to get the fans going if we were back home.
Best to wait it out here, anyways. The man next
to her says, the freeways a parking lot. Everyone who
can is bolting out of town, heading somewhere higher and cooler.
Radio says, a bunch of people diet already when their
cars broke down and they cooked by the side of
the road. You hand out the last of your supplies
to the encampment's grateful residence. Before you turn back to
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your car, you check your phone to see if your
neighbor texted you that the power was back on. No news.
You aren't sure if you really want to head back
to your house in the middle of all this. The
overpass might be more comfortable. Someone set up too large
kiddie pools filled with water. There's music and solar charged
batteries to keep your phone topped off. All things considered,
it's one of the more comfortable places you could weigh
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out the heat wave. As you pull this over, you
notice flashing lights as a half dozen police cars and
a riot van pulled up by the overpass. It all
happened so quickly that you stand there stunned for a moment.
As officers begin to form ranks on the far side
of the encampment. You look behind you, just in time
to see more cars pull up, including one large cruiser
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with an l RT on its back. This is the
police department. They say this encampment is a fire hazard.
The mayor has declared a state of emergency. You all
need to disperse now. All around you, encampment residents and
activists begin to pick up shields, pipes, and bottles. They
form crude lines to face off against the riot officers
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marching in from both sides. Your heart starts to pound.
You see the normies. The one is not too sick
with heat stroke to stand start glancing around in the
same way you are trying to weigh the best of
their options. Most of them are stuck here. But you
still have a nearly full tank of gas. You can
get away for now, at least. In two thousand eleven,
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exactly a decade ago. As I typed this, my partner
and I drove eleven or so hours south from our
home in Dallas to the border town of Marfa, Texas.
Back then, Marfa had a population of about hundred. It's
a beautiful place, surrounded by the kind of wild scrub
brush desert that outsiders assume most Texans live in. Marfa
is famous as the former home of artist Donald Judd,
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and as a result, the whole place has a strange vibe,
a mix of rural South Texas grit and woo woo
artsy flair. We'd chosen to visit in April, traditionally one
of the mildest months for Texan weather, but it was
unreasonably warm when we arrived, and the whole state had
suffered through a bizarrely dry spring. As we drove into town,
we saw smoke on the far horizon. We didn't know
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it then, but an electric short in an abandoned building
had sparked what would eventually grow into the rock House fire.
We lived out of my prius and motels at that point,
and we spent most of the day driving or staggering
from bar to bar to a rad grilled cheese restaurant,
talking to locals while we watched the flames burn across
the horizon. We saw the fire eat Mount Marathon, and
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we sat on the deck of a bar talking to
locals who had driven what possessions they could into town
and then abandoned their homes to the blaze. There goes
my house, someone would say, pointing to local news coverage
and ordering another round. What we drank and gawked. Nearby
ranchers were cutting their fences. There was no time to
evacuate the herds, so the best they could do was
cut holes in the barbed wire and give the animals
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a slim chance of fleeing to safety. By the time
night fell, the whole horizon burned. Every government building in
Marfa was empty. There were no cops. Everyone was a firefighter.
That night, we eventually headed to a nearby motel. The
door to the office was empty and the lights were on.
On the desk was a bucket of keys and a
sign informing us that the owners were both volunteer firefighters
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and that we should just take a key and pay
in the morning. The rock House fire would eventually burn
more than three hundred and fourteen thousand acres in two counties.
It marked the beginning of a historic wildfire season in Texas.
Over the next six months, more than thirty one thousand,
four hundred and fifty three fires would burn a total
of four million acres or sixteen thousand square miles, an
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area larger than Switzerland. Ten years later, almost to the month,
my new home state of Oregon was hit by an
unprecedented heat dome. Temperatures in the state capital neared a
hundred and nineteen degrees, seven degrees hotter than it has
ever been in Dallas. Crops died, along with more than
a billion sea creatures. Along the northwest coast, the verdant
woods of the Pacific Northwest dried out and caught fire.
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As i type this, the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon
is the largest in state history. It is burnt over
three hundred thousand acres, and it is still not contained.
It's started less than a year after an unprecedented series
of wildfires blanketed much of northern Oregon in orange clouds
of smoke that choked every living creature for weeks. For
a brief span of time, a tree filled Portland had
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lower air quality than New Delhi, India. The heat dome
that just hit us landed alongside articles telling us it
was a once in a thousand years weather event. I
read similar articles earlier this year when I was with
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my family back in Dallas watching an unprecedented blizzard drop
temperatures below zero for the first time in Texas history.
One man too, once in a millennia weather events in
the same six months span. Texas is infamously idiosyncratic power
grid buckled under the strain of so many homes putting
their heaters on full blast. The state only narrowly avoided
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a complete grid collapse that would have left much of
it powerless for months. Between four d seventy six and
nine hundred and seventy eight Texans died in a single
week from a mix of carbon monoxide poisoning, exposure, and
ice related crashes. In Oregon during the heat dome, northwestern
asphalt roads buckled and power cables to street cars frayed.
Portland was forced to shut down its max light rail line,
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stranding many poor and elderly citizens inside their overheated homes.
At least a hundred and sixteen people died in Oregon,
nearly five hundred people died in British Columbia during the
worst of the heat wave. Oregon Governor Kate Brown and
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler were nowhere to be found. Like
most wealthy people, they fled to more comfortable climbs or
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at least air conditioning, while those who could not escape
suffered or died. The same story played out in Canada,
where the Vancouver City Planning Commission issued a scathing report
about the other lack of preparation on behalf of the
city government quote failing to act and create policy that
reflects the reality of people's lives can and will cause
people who would otherwise be alive to die. Where arement failed,
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normal people were forced to take matters into their own hands.
Mutual aid cooling stations were organized and set up across Portland, Eugene,
and Salem, providing people with wet towels, frozen water bottles,
and shade. One homeless man set up an above ground
swimming pool beneath an overpass. In Salem, police repeatedly destroyed
cooling stations under the guise of breaking up homeless encampments.
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These gestures were, in the grand scale of the calamity,
fairly minor, but they illustrate an important point. When disaster strikes,
communities nearly always respond more effectively than governments. This is
a well documented phenomenon in the field of disaster response studies.
In nineteen sixty two, when nine point two magnitude earthquake
hit the Alaskan Coast, Anchorage was utterly devastated. Whole neighborhoods
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fell off of cliffs. The first thing the police did
was deputize a crowd of half drunk volunteers to stop
people from looting, even though no looting had been observed.
The police chief was so worried about disorder that he
almost instantly suspended the search for survivors. Thankfully, the people
of Anchorage were not so easily scared. Spontaneously organized groups
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of civilians pulled every survivor from the rebel By the
next day, volunteers had organized, with no input from the government,
a man power control team where people with skills, carpenters plumbers,
electricians in the like were matched up with jobs that
needed doing. As it happened, a team of social scientists
from Ohio State University were in town studying disaster response
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under a grant from the U. S. Military. Based on
the science of the time, they expected sheer panic. Here's
what they found instead, From a write up by James
Meags in Commentary magazine Quote. The team stayed for a
week and interviewed nearly five hundred people. Enrico Quarantelli, the
leader of the study, was particularly interested in Anchorage's small
Civil Defense office. It should have been in charge of
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search and rescue, but Quarantelli noted, had quickly become bogged
down of her questions of bureaucratic protocol. Of course, Bill
Davis's amateur mountaineers had taken over that function on most immediately.
Quarantilly used the term emergent groups to describe the teams
of self organized volunteers like Davis's searchers. He didn't miss
the irony that the agency created to protect civilians soon
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became an obstacle that this emergent group of rescuers had
to work around. We are standing all of us on
the cusp of an age of the unprecedented, a time
when most people are likely to experience once in a
millennium disasters on a near annual basis. The only thing
we can truly know about our unknowable future is that
this is a problem our present governments cannot and will
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not fix. We will cover that idea in more depth later,
but for now, it's important to accept that help is
not coming. When the wildfires blanketed Oregon in smoke last year,
the state responded by handing out lucrative logging contracts to
their political donors. This was done under the guise of
wildfire preparedness. All it really did was released more carbon
into the atmosphere. The fire still came. When Texas's power
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grid failed in February, the company that administers at Aircot
made two point four billion dollars. Conservative politicians took to
social media to defend Texan independence. Lawmakers turn their efforts
to legalizing permitless concealed kerry and restricting voting rights. Aircot
donated one million dollars to Governor Abbott, and he refused
to call for grid reforms during a special session of
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the state legislature. Nothing was done to fix the grid,
and when the first summer heat waves hit, AIRCOT asked
citizens to keep their thermostats at eighty degrees while they slept.
When some people with health conditions attempted to cool their
homes further, they found that their new connected thermostats raised
the temperature without their consent. The failure of our elites
to handle the disasters wrought by climate change is not
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the result of a grand conspiracy. More than anything, it
is the result of selfishness and confusion. Most of these
people are just as blindsided by the disasters racking our
world as anyone else, because they're the kind of people
who are capable of taking power. They look out for
themselves first, and in chaotic and dangerous times, they default
to what they know best, leaning on culture war bullshit,
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and hiding from scrutiny. There are a couple of military
concepts that I find helpful for analyzing times like these.
One is VUCA vu C, a an acronym that identifies
situations of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. VUCA situations are
obviously dangerous, but the sheer amount of information coming in
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can be blinding, and the best course of action is
generally unclear. Leads are actually more likely to be blinded
in these situations than the rest of us. A mayor,
or a police chief or a president has much more
information incoming, and his concern in a heat wave is
always more complex than what needs to be done to
protect people, because what is politically safe, what do my
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donors want, and how will what I do be spun
by the media are also on his mind. Ultimately, people
like us worry will my community and I survive? And
people like them worry will I lose power. This tug
of war between this aster and political expediency, between preparing
for the inevitable and protecting your ass leads to a
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phenomenon called turbo paralysis. This was first coined back in
two thousand twelve by a fellow named Mark Lynde, and
he described it as quote combination of vigorous and dramatic
motion with the absence of steady movement in any particular direction.
You may recognize this as an apt description of how
our nation has handled climate change for the last several decades.
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I want to quote here from a very useful document
titled the Gonzo Futurist Manifesto. Quote in this reading, a
sudden spike of VUKA dynamics causes big actors, big business,
Nation States organizations to flail wildly, muddying the waters with
U turns and knee jerk cargo cult behavior as the
old certainties are swept away. For cyberpunk Archdeacon Bruce Sterling,
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this is the transition to nowhere. There's neither progress nor
conservatism because there's nothing left to conserve and no direction
in which to progress. From the U. S. Republican Party
to occupy Wall Street, from Benghazi to Wukan. Wheels are
spinning furiously and engines are being gunned to no effect.
Now politicians can afford to spin their wheels indefinitely, or
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at least as long as the political system they thrive
and continues to exist. Many powerful actors like fossil fuel
companies and defense contractors thrive so long as the rest
of us stay locked in this place. But you and
I cannot survive in a state of turbo paralysis. As
I noted earlier, it's easy to avoid that in the
moment of a disaster if you're a regular person looking
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at a problem and finding ways to mitigate the damage.
Mutual Aid in response to calamity is the norm. But
when it comes to the bigger question, how are we
going to survive in this world? How can my community
adapt to be less vulnerable? How can we stop things
from spinning out of control? Well that's when turbo paralysis
kicks in again, because we don't have the luxury of
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just dealing with climate change and its consequences. We've got
gangs of fascists marching through city streets every powerful and
violent cops murdering people and gassing descent children in cages
on the border. And my god, when you start to
list it all or try to take it all in
on Twitter, you're liable to have a panic attack. As
much positive as I've said about mutual aid, I want
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to acknowledge here that it alone is not enough. It
can't be a good example of why comes just this
year from India. Their right wing central governments so thoroughly
botched the COVID nineteen response that corpse fires were burning
in the streets of almost every major city. Hospitals took
to Twitter to beg for oxygen. The government suddenly adopted
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a liberalized vaccine policy that put the onus for vaccine
procurement on individual states, which led to nine corporate hospital
chains acquiring half the available vaccine doses. Rather than go
door to door handing out vaccines, which is how India
wiped out polio doses cost about sixteen dollars in a
country where a hundred and thirty four million people make
less than two dollars a day. In response to the
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utter failure of its elites, the Indian p a Bowl
took matters into their own hands. And I want to
quote now from a wonderful write up in The Baffler
titled how it Feels Confronted by the complete breakdown of
the state's health care infrastructure, Ordinary civilians did that most
Indian thing jow god, a commonly used Hindi word referring
to a stop gap solution or using limited resources. Innovatively,
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volunteers mobilized on WhatsApp, discord, Twitter, Instagram, and any number
of social media platforms to connect COVID nineteen patients and
their families somehow to some form of medical care. Civil
society groups, nonprofits, students, journalists, and lawyers started fielding distress
messages posted online. Informal coalitions formed based on hashtags like
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s OS city name or hashtag COVID emergency volunteers scrambled
to procure drugs they knew little about and couldn't pronounce
bar siddonip, toxl zoom. App Lists were compiled of hospitals
with available beds, chemists who had rim disavere in plasma,
hospitals admitting patients in the I c U. Every what
I knew was glued to their phones. We will probably
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never know how many people survived because of stopgap efforts,
and people like Ritty dested Are who wrote the article
I just quoted. These folks were heroes, but between one
point six million and four point two million Indians are
still likely to have died of COVID, most just this year,
the official government count hovers it just over four hundred thousand.
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And while mutual aid did save untold lives, the trauma
of responding to such a calamity on the fly has
left permanent marks on Ready and their peers. Quote. We
have tried to fill in the blank where the government's
public health response should be, working ourselves to the bone
and missing paid work opportunities. I know volunteers who have
physically arranged ambulances and transported elderly patients who are alone.
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Many have been infected themselves or lost family, including my
friends Fetha, whose grandfather passed away in November. In the
last two weeks of April and Delhi, volunteers barely slept
or eight more than one meal a day. Nights were
the worst, with the most critical cases arising after ten pm,
when government officials tap out. There were instances where Sweater
reached out to top state officials who told her they
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would return in the morning. I have nightmares of hospitals
and people crying. I remember passing out on the floor
of my hall at four am and waking up at
eight am to the news that my patient had died,
she says. I remember texting my friends to say I
need some time to cry. I want to cry. There
is no time to cry. Like many volunteers, I've become
alienated from my own body. I cry involuntarily before even
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realizing I'm sad. I wake up repeatedly throughout the night.
I think of patients who died while I was trying
to help, and my throat chokes up even now. I
returned to the moment I texted Magna saying, why isn't
he breathing. Where is his cylinder? What are his oxygen levels?
And she replied, my father is expired. When disasters are
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singular limited in scope, like that earthquake and anchorage, mutual
aid can be enough. People pull together and help each other,
the calamity passes and life goes on. That is not
the situation we find ourselves in today. Mutual aid alone
is not enough because the central disaster we face has
no end point. There is no going back to normal,
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because we now live in post normal times. Post normal
is a term created by a British philosopher and an
Argentinean mathematician in a paper about the new conditions of
science in a time of increased turbulence and uncertainty. In
that document, I recommended the Gonzo Futurist's Manifesto. The author
quotes scholar Zayad and Sardar when he describes post normal
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times as characterized by uncertainty, rapid change, realignment of power, upheaval,
and chaotic behavior. We live in an in between period
where old orthodoxes are dying, new ones have yet to
be borne, and very few things seem to make sense.
A transitional age, a time without the confidence that we
can return to any past we have known and with
no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable, or
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sustainable future. Post normal times require post normal solutions. This
means moving beyond merely meeting needs and disasters and doing
something bolder, building a new social safety net and a
new society capable of anticipating need, preparing for disaster, and
providing people with a way to get care and give
care in a persistent manner. This is necessary because the
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only way to force our civilization back from the edge
of catastrophe is something very much like a revolution. Before
you make assumptions, I want to be clear that I
think dreams of violent overthrow of the government, red flags
and a K forty sevens and the like are foolish.
They're useless too. You could perhaps lock the U. S
Military into a long term, multi sided insurgency, but such
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a fight would not resolve in any reasonable time frame
and would cause the U. S Military, already Earth's number
one carbon emetter, to pump even more poison into the atmosphere.
The only thing that will work is the political equivalent
of a heart attack, clogging the valves of capital with
a united mass of human beings who demand concerted action
not just on the climate, but on all the myriad
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injustices of our age. I'm talking about a general strike.
And if you don't think one can work, think about
the longest government shutdown in US history. It happened in
two thousand nineteen, if you can remember that far back,
when President Trump refused to sign a budget that didn't
include five point seven billion dollars in funding for his
border wall. The shutdown dragged on for thirty five days.
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It ended, in large part because the American Association of
Flight Attendants called for a general strike. Hours after union
head Sarah Nelson announced that attendants were mobilizing to strike,
which would have effectively ground at all US air travel,
President Trump agreed to reopen the government. Now, what we
actually need here is a true general strike, something that
brings together tens of millions of workers across the country.
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That is a titanic undertaking and endeavor more ambitious and
complex than the moon landing. To even make it possible,
we will require national mutual aid infrastructure on a scale
never before seen. Striking workers need food, power, medical care,
eviction defense, and much more. The best rubric we have
for how mutual aid on that scale might look comes
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from the island of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is a
colony of the United States, and for decades as people
have languished as second class citizens, forced to pay into
the American Project but excluded from many of its benefits.
In two thousand and sixteen, the Obama administration placed a
Fiscal Oversight Board to manage the island's debt load. This
led to cuts to services that sparked a two thousand
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seventeen students strike against austerity and cuts to public education.
Activists organized community kitchens for socialized food distribution. This had
been a building trend in Puerto Rican organizing for a while,
but in when Hurricane Maria hit, it reached unprecedented scale.
From a rite up by Isa Soto quote tired of
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watching people die after Hurricane Rhea, Puerto Ricans needed to
do two things. Filled the immediate gaps in order to
keep people alive, and at the same time continued to
demand accountability in actions from governments. Disaster relief funds and
supplies were slow to reach communities in need. Some people
buried their dead in their back yards. Thousands left for
the US mainland and a year after the hurricane, some
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people were still living without electrical service. It was evident
the state had collapsed. The protest signs that read only
the people will save the people took on a new
and raw meeting. If Puerto Ricans were to wait for
the state, federal, or local to address the absolute devastation
and lack of resources, many would die waiting. During that time,
multiple organizations, mostly based on grassroots groups that existed prior
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to the hurricane, quickly organized to channel aid. Puerto Ricans
have been abandoned by their so called government for a
very long time, and as a result, their mutual aid
solutions are commensurately grander than anything we've seen and say, Portland,
the network of community kitchens that formed after Maria had
no head, no NGO or govern are overseeing things. They
eventually cooked more than a hundred thousand meals per day.
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An entire island was fed by its own people coming
together to keep each other alive, while the man who
called himself their president hooked paper towels into a crowd.
The example set by Puerto Rica gives us an idea
a glimpse of the scale of effort that will be
needed to turn this ship around. It is a daunting task,
but this is thankfully a situation where we get to
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kill two birds with one stone, because the thing that
got us into this mess, the social atomization, selfishness and
greed that lies at the core of capitalism, has only
one antidote, taking care of each other.