A Paradise Built in Hell (48 page)

When I began to discover the remarkable findings and conclusions of the disaster sociologists, particularly the profoundly positive views of Charles Fritz, they seemed to confirm a sunny view of human nature. But not everyone behaves well. Elite panic in disaster, as identified by the contemporary disaster scholars, is shaped by belief, belief that since human beings at large are bestial and dangerous, the believer must himself or herself act with savagery to ensure individual safety or the safety of his or her interests. The elites that panic are, in times of crisis, the minority, and understanding that could marginalize or even disarm them, literally and psychologically, as well as the media that magnify their message. This would help open the way to create a world more like the brief utopias that flash up in disaster.

At the end of 2008, a report by the U.S. Army War College proposed that the economic crisis could lead to civil unrest requiring military intervention. Treasury secretary Henry Paulson had himself suggested martial law might be required, and the Phoenix police were themselves preparing to suppress civil unrest, including that provoked by the economic downturn. Even as the Bush administration was fading from the scene, those in power continued to regard the public as the enemy.

Relieving those in charge of their entrenched beliefs will not be easy. Lee Clarke, the coauthor of the definitive essay on elite panic, told me that after 9/11 he found himself at a lot of conferences sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and by FEMA. There he tried to tell the bureaucrats what actually works in disasters. “In a chaotic situation command and control is bound to fail,” he’d say of the top-down management system many organizations deploy in crisis. He told the disaster administrators who wanted to know what message to give people in disaster that it is the people who might have some messages to give them on what’s actually going on and what’s actually needed. Clarke concluded, “They don’t have a way to fold civil society into their official conceptions.”

Federal bureaucrats under Bush weren’t doing well with these new ideas, but at more local levels many planners and administrators have changed disaster plans and underlying premises. During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, San Francisco houses built on the unstable landfill of the Marina District collapsed and caught fire, and firefighters were overwhelmed with the task of fighting the flames with broken water mains. Volunteers helped carry heavy hoses from the waterfront, where a fireboat pumped seawater to put out the flames. The San Francisco Fire Department’s report on the quake says, “Hundreds of citizen volunteers assisted the Fire Department at the Marina District fire and the collapse of a building at Sixth and Bluxome streets. Some, acting under the direction of Department members, were instrumental in rescue and fire suppression operations. Clearly, the organization and direction of volunteers must be addressed.” A more marked difference from the suspicion and divisiveness of such authority in the 1906 earthquake could not be found—though the writers of the report might have noted that the volunteers did well without being organized or more than haphazardly directed.

In the aftermath, the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) program was created to train volunteers to take care of their neighborhoods and city in disaster. The fire department runs the program, which has trained more than seventeen thousand citizens. The city used the centennial of the 1906 quake to urge, via bus placards, billboards, and more, disaster preparedness in every home—not only the stockpiling of supplies but also the creation of emergency plans. The NERT program trusts citizens and distributes power to the thousands who have been trained in basic rescue, firefighting, and first-aid techniques and given safety vests, hardhats, and badges. What this city government has learned—or admitted—is that it is inadequate to respond to or control response to a disaster and that the only viable strategy is to invite citizens to take power. Nationwide, particularly since 9/11, citizen emergency response team programs are growing, and the disaster managers who have become part of city and regional government are generally free of the old clichés and fears about ordinary people’s behavior in disaster.

The San Francisco Fire Department estimates that an 8.3 earthquake with wind at ten miles an hour could generate 71 large fires, which would require 273 fire engines—though the city has only 41. On the other hand, said firefighter Ed Chu at my NERT training in late 2006, “eighty percent of people saved in a disaster can be saved without specialized skills.” He stressed that the timeliness of the rescue mattered most for those who were trapped, which is why neighbors are often more important than experts. At the end of the training, participants were divided into teams and given a list of emergencies to prioritize—nonfatally injured senior citizens, downed overhead electrical lines, and a small fire in a building in this town of densely packed wooden buildings where fire spreads readily. My team decided to put out the fire first, since it seemed like a chance to prevent greater harm, and were roundly scolded. The firefighters amazed me by saying, “In a disaster, property no longer matters. Only people matter.” We had come a long way from San Francisco in 1906.

Property matters in another sense: San Francisco’s government emphasizes that citizens are likely to be on their own for the first seventy-two hours after an earthquake, but the poor are unlikely to set aside the earthquake emergency kits and supplies, including food and water, the city urged all citizens to keep on hand. As for New Orleans, Hurricane Gustav threatened the city three years after Katrina, and the event was a measure of what had changed and what was still rotten. Images of water lapping over the levees flanking the Lower Ninth Ward suggested that they were not nearly high enough. The Superdome had a gigantic lock on it, and no one was invited to shelter in place. This time Mayor Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation in time, but for the estimated thirty thousand without resources to evacuate themselves, this meant lining up for a long wait for buses to unknown destinations. The evacuees were processed, given wrist bracelets, and bused to warehouses, where they were confined. Many were subjected to arrest and imprisonment after background checks—though thanks to New Orleans’s shoddy record-keeping, many of them were arrested for charges that had been dismissed but not cleared. Background checks constitute part of the criminalization of disaster victims. An estimated half of all undocumented immigrants in New Orleans were trapped by fear of being denied services or deported and did not evacuate—and this population is deeply imperiled by such criminalization. Many who evacuated by means of the government vowed not to do so again.

It was hard this time around to say whether the problem was the system in that moment or the poverty that consigned so many to such a crude and criminalizing system. Many lessons had still not been learned. As the storm approached, CNN ran a teaser about rape, murder, and looting, and Nagin announced, in a threat played over and over, “Anyone who’s caught looting will be sent directly to Angola”—the notorious former slave plantation and current maximum-security prison. “You will go directly to Angola Prison and God bless you when you get there.” In the same speech he warned that the thousands of FEMA trailers from which those still displaced after three years had presumably been evacuated “will become projectiles” in the violent winds. New Orleans was vulnerable not only because of its setting—facing the great cauldron of hurricanes that is the Caribbean across an eroded buffer zone of wetlands in an era of climate change—but because of its social divides and injustices.

 

 

 

Fixing those wrongs and wounds in New Orleans and everywhere else is the work that everyday disaster requires of us. Recognizing the wealth of meaning and love such work provides is the reward everyday disaster invites us to claim. Joy matters too, and that it is found in this most unpromising of circumstances demonstrates again the desires that have survived dreariness and division for so long. The existing system is built on fear of each other and of scarcity, and it has created more scarcity and more to be afraid of. It is mitigated every day by altruism, mutual aid, and solidarity, by the acts of individuals and organizations who are motivated by hope and by love rather than fear. They are akin to a shadow government—another system ready to do more were they voted into power. Disaster votes them in, in a sense, because in an emergency these skills and ties work while fear and divisiveness do not. Disaster reveals what else the world could be like—reveals the strength of that hope, that generosity, and that solidarity. It reveals mutual aid as a default operating principle and civil society as something waiting in the wings when it’s absent from the stage.

A world could be built on that basis, and to do so would redress the long divides that produce everyday pain, poverty, and loneliness and in times of crisis homicidal fear and opportunism. This is the only paradise that is possible, and it will never exist whole, stable, and complete. It is always coming into being in response to trouble and suffering; making paradise is the work that we are meant to do. All the versions of an achieved paradise sound at best like an eternal vacation, a place where we would have no meaning to make. The paradises built in hell are improvisational; we make them up as we go along, and in so doing they call on all our strength and creativity and leave us free to invent even as we find ourselves enmeshed in community. These paradises built in hell show us both what we want and what we can be.

In the 1906 earthquake, a mansion burned down but its stone portals remained standing. A photograph shows that suddenly, rather than framing the entrance to a private interior, they framed the whole city beyond the hill where the ruins stood. Disaster sometimes knocks down institutions and structures and suspends private life, leaving a broader view of what lies beyond. The task before us is to recognize the possibilities visible through that gateway and endeavor to bring them into the realm of the everyday.

Disasters take place on the scale of the personal as well, and for those who are lucky they muster a small version of disaster utopias and societies. I was lucky. Midway through the writing of this book, I underwent a short-lived but serious illness. The medical details don’t matter here, but the social ones do. I had lived through the stories of many disasters, spent time with people who evacuated the Twin Towers or found themselves stranded on a roof during Katrina, been much affected by my own city during the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, been around floods and fires, but this was a more intense experience for me and very much one of disaster in miniature. With what I had learned from my researches, I regarded my own mental and emotional states with great interest. At one point I was so exhausted that much of what I ordinarily cared about didn’t matter, and I was content to be rather than do
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There was a strange serenity to this condition, a suspension of ordinary time and ordinary annoyances and ambitions. As Fritz had noted, “Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and future because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs within the context of the present realities.” So does illness. Going on being—surviving—was the task at hand, and it was entirely absorbing.

As the illness faded, I found that it had made me fiercer—less willing to waste my time and more urgent about what mattered. As Gioconda Belli had said about the Managua earthquake, “You realize that life has to be lived well or is not worth living. It’s a very profound transformation that takes place during catastrophes. It’s like a near-death experience but lived collectively.” After the way the people around me rose to the occasion, I was left with confidence that the love and bonds that mattered had been and would be there. In a weak moment, I wished that life could always be like this and then realized that I didn’t need such tender care the rest of the time but that it was always there, latent, implicit, a premise from which I could operate all the time. It made everyday life a little better. And it made me think the same latencies pertain to the society at large, not consistently, but in ways that can matter a lot.

This book is dedicated to the citizens of my own small disaster utopia, with love:

This project began as the Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture at Jesus College of Cambridge University, commissioned by Professor Rod Mengham there, and became a talk at Yale’s Agrarian Studies collo quium, where Professor James Scott provided brilliant commentary and encouragement. It then metamorphosed into an essay for
Harper’s
magazine that went to press the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. My splendid editor there, Luke Mitchell, insisted that my optimism about human nature would be proven right even while I quailed at the avalanche of stories claiming sheer savagery had been unloosed. Luke was right. I equivocated for a while, but the sorrows and secrets of Katrina made it seem important to continue a project that had begun almost as a whim, an investigation of the strange joy I’d found in my own 1989 earthquake experiences and elsewhere, and became a long excavation into unacknowledged social desires and possibilities. Thus, this book.

Over and over again, I went looking for the meaning of disaster and found friendship as well. Dan Bollwinkle, who came along early to transcribe dozens of interviews and to talk about his own good work on the tsunami in Thailand, was particularly generous, as was sociologist Michael Schwartz, who appeared via our connection at TomDispatch. com at the perfect moment to read the first draft and provide brilliantly insightful analysis and critique of the social and political ideas here and considerable encouragement. Also providing valuable readings of the first draft were Brad Erickson, Adam Hochschild, and Marina Sitrin.