These questions are just as timely today. Not only is the country dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also facing a political crisis. And on top of these global and national issues, there are often painful personal matters, such as the sort of health crisis that my own family recently experienced. In each instance, neighborhoods have a critical role to play in easing adversity and averting disaster.

The inspiration to write my book came from the murder-suicide of a couple—both physicians—who lived on my suburban street in Rochester, New York. One evening the husband came home and shot and killed his wife, and then himself; their children, a boy, 11, and a girl, 12, ran screaming into the night.

What struck me—besides the tragedy—was how little it seemed to affect the neighbors. A family who had lived on our street for seven years had vanished, and yet the impact on the neighborhood seemed slight. No one, I learned, had known the family well. Few of my neighbors, I later learned, knew each other more than casually; many didn’t know even the names of those a door or two away.

Do I live in a neighborhood, I asked myself, or just in a house on a street surrounded by people whose lives are entirely separate? Why, I wondered, in this age of instant and universal communication—when we can create community anywhere—do we often not know the people who live next door?

To see if I could connect with my neighbors beyond a superficial level, I asked them if I could sleep over at their houses and write about their lives on our street from inside their own homes. Somewhat to my surprise, about half the neighbors I approached said yes.

Getting to know my neighbors in this way enlivened the experience of living there. It helped me forge connections that enriched my life, and made it easier for the people on my street to look out for each other.

After I told my story in the book, I heard from people all over the world about how much they missed close neighborhood ties. They also told of more recent times when they’d managed to connect with their neighbors, and how gratifying those experiences had been.

Interestingly, many of those happy connections between neighbors occurred in response to natural disasters. On the West Coast, readers recounted earthquakes and fires; in the South, hurricanes and floods; in the North, massive snowstorms. “When the power went out,” a Florida man wrote me of his neighborhood during Hurricane Andrew, “we began to cook our meals in the street. We enjoyed getting to know each other and learning each other’s stories. After a few days the power came back and we all went back inside. It’s funny, but I find myself looking forward to the next hurricane so we can catch up.”

Today, we’re all living through an unfamiliar kind of natural disaster—the coronavirus pandemic—and I see that neighbors are connecting, once again. We’ve read and heard a lot of these stories, so I’ll share just one from my own family.

Just after New Year’s 2020, my 4-year-old granddaughter, my daughter’s child, was diagnosed with a rare form of childhood cancer. Suddenly, her life and the lives of her parents and 2-year-old sister were upended. What had been the happy, busy life of a growing family was now beset by fear, anger, uncertainty, trips at all hours to the hospital, increased medical bills and two parents trying to work remotely from home.

My daughter’s family lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., where the response to their 4-year-old’s health crisis was… nothing. This was not because the neighbors were unkind; it was mostly because my daughter and her husband, after living in their home for nearly four years, knew few, if any, of their neighbors well.

But the COVID-19 pandemic came just three months after my granddaughter’s diagnosis. Suddenly everyone in the neighborhood was living with fear and uncertainty, working remotely from home, and struggling with unknowns including reduced income. On a neighborhood listserv, someone offered to buy groceries and other supplies for anyone especially vulnerable to the virus.

My daughter responded:

Hi neighbors-
Some of you have offered so generously to pick up groceries for those of us who are immunosuppressed. I’m pregnant and one of my children has cancer. If anyone happens to be at a store this week selling toilet paper, tissues, or paper towels, please pick up some extra for us! Happy to pay, of course.
Thank you!
Valerie

The response was swift and strong:

My daughter will deliver items shortly (I’ll wear gloves when I put the items in the bag, so nothing will have been touched by anyone in the house).
Amy

We dropped off some tissue boxes a few mins ago. 
Allison & Michael

I have a couple smaller boxes of tissues I’d be happy to drop off to you. Oh and I can give you a container of Clorox wipes too.
Betsy

I just dropped off paper towels and tissues at your front door.
Fran

And that was only the beginning. For weeks, my daughter has been finding bags of groceries and paper goods on her doorstep; in most cases, the neighbors decline payment. “Don’t be silly,” one wrote. “There will surely come a time when I need a favor from a neighbor.”

Today, my granddaughter’s treatments continue and her prognosis is good. Her family’s life is still upended, but now at least they are aided and comforted to know they live among people who know and care about them. Once again, it took a terrible event to bring neighbors together.

Can we find ways to connect with each other without a disaster?

As Americans we have an independent streak; our impulse for freedom and self-reliance often comes more naturally than the desire for community. Social trends also work against connections. Two-career couples mean fewer people are at home or have the leisure time to interact with neighbors. Larger suburban homes—and the lots they sit on—increase physical distance. Ever-increasing hours of screen time leave us less time to socialize. And the persistent fear we call “stranger danger” steers us away from meeting others—even those who live nearby.

I’m afraid it would be naïve to think that—in the absence of a new disaster—we will all just reach out to our neighbors because it’s a nice thing to do.

So, let me offer a different incentive.

Pandemic aside, this country is experiencing a crisis: Politically, we have torn ourselves in half. Whichever side you’re on, half the country thinks you’re not only wrong, but insane.

It’s a crisis that poses a threat greater than any hurricane, fire, earthquake, or pandemic. Left unchecked, I fear it can rip us in two and in the process—regardless of which side prevails—destroy the very protections we rely on for our freedom.

What is the answer? History suggests if we want to begin to repair the social fabric, a good place to start is our own neighborhoods.

Like the meetinghouses and common greens of earlier times, neighborhoods long have been the building blocks of a healthy civil society. Today, they are a place that allows us to get to know, regularly and intimately, people who may think differently than we do. With effort, we can come to know our neighbors beyond a superficial level, to know their challenges and the fullness of their lives. Once we do that, it becomes hard to mark them only with political labels.

For example, there’s a couple that lives near me. Over the years, I’ve seen them work long hours to build their own businesses—he in sales and she in consulting. I’ve come to know the two children they adopted, and for whom they’ve made a loving home. I watched as they remodeled a spare room for her mom to live in when she could no longer live alone. So, I’m not inclined to dismiss my neighbors—and certainly not to think them evil or insane—merely because they’ve posted a lawn sign supporting a national candidate with whom I disagree.

“In this age of bitter partisanship and social division,” writes Ryan Streeter, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, “unity and social healing are not only possible but happening every day when we work with and rely on those who are closest to us.”

In the 2019 Survey on Community and Society, Streeter and colleagues found that most Americans get a stronger sense of community from those they’re close to, including neighbors, than from “their ethnicity or political ideology.” Moreover, they found we’re 11 times more likely to report high levels of confidence in our neighbors than in the federal government, and five times more than in our city councils. Seventy-three percent of us say our neighbors can be counted on to do the right thing.

So let’s not wait for the next natural or even man-made disaster to get to reach out to our neighbors. We have a strong enough motive: healing the bitter partisanship that infects our country.

How to get started? I think it’s just one neighbor at a time. You don’t even have to sleep over. All it takes is making a phone call, sending an e-mail, or ringing a bell.

The post Your Neighbors Can Help You Battle Adversity and Disaster appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This question often has been answered by referencing Mexico. Political scientists often link Mexico City’s devastating 8.0 magnitude earthquake on September 19, 1985, to the end of the PRI’s seven-decades-long rule of the country 15 years later. Their argument is not that the party was responsible for the loss of some 10,000 lives, but rather that the disaster exposed the incompetence and corruption of a regime that until then seemed to control everything. While the government of President Miguel de la Madrid looked hopeless, if not helpless, ordinary citizens took the lead in rescuing survivors and helping the injured. It was this unexpected bottom-up movement of people that presaged the eventual demise of the then-ruling PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).

Today, the question of earthquakes and politics is again alive, with two new terremotos, including a 7.1-magnitude quake on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 disaster, devastating Mexico as the PRI again clings to power. The response of ordinary citizens has been reminiscent of the 1985 quake: Tens of hundreds of young people in hard hats spontaneously joined the rescue operation, digging into rubble with bare hands and forming long lines to carry away pieces of concrete and mortar from collapsed buildings.

Despite the parallels, however, predictions of a political earthquake are overblown. Mexico’s quakes may shake the earth, but their political power has long been overestimated. The story of Mexico City quakes, past and present, reminds us that such events make slow impacts, and only damage political orders that were already weak and cracked. And for all the civic action that a tragedy may produce, the impact is temporary.

As a longtime resident and observer of Mexico, I have waited in vain for decades for an autonomous civil society to emerge there. The 1985 earthquake certainly didn’t produce it—nor was the quake the main catalyst for the end of the PRI’s rule.

The unraveling of Mexico’s one-party system really began with the economic crisis of 1982, which shook the country far more than any movement of the earth. The collapse of the peso was followed by high inflation, a deep recession, and a widespread sense of despair. There had been a lesser crisis and currency devaluation in 1976, but it was soon hidden by important off-shore oil discoveries and massive foreign borrowing. After 1982, there were no such band-aids. It was this moment that broke the unwritten contract between the PRI and Mexico’s middle classes.

This contract was simple. A broad political class, which controlled the peasantry, labor unions, and civil servants through the PRI, had brought the country three decades of steady economic growth nicknamed the Mexican “miracle.” In exchange, the growing urban middle classes spent more time vacationing in Acapulco than engaging in politics. Occasionally dissident groups appeared, even armed guerrillas in the mid-1970s, but they were either crushed or co-opted by the system.

The lack of economic growth was far more unsettling. Without it, the ruling political elite was unmasked as self-serving and corrupt and the middle classes began demanding a voice in the country’s affairs.

The demands grew in 1988 when the PRI resorted to fraud to insure the victory of its presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, over his left-leaning opponent, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Ignoring pressure for greater political freedom, Salinas instead chose economic reform, which included privatization of major state-owned companies and utilities and, later, negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada.

Darker days followed. When an armed group known as the Zapatistas took up arms in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994, the rebellion won popular sympathy simply for daring to defy the regime. Three months later, Salinas’s hand-picked successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was murdered. Weeks after his PRI replacement, Ernesto Zedillo, took office, a new economic crisis erupted and, with it, fresh middle-class anger at the regime.

With his back to the wall, Zedillo sought to release political pressure by permitting genuinely free elections, with the result that in mid-term elections in 1997 the PRI for the first time ever lost control of the Chamber of Deputies. Then in 2000, to the fury of PRI party dinosaurs, Zedillo refused to step in to block the victory of the conservative National Action Party’s presidential candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. The impossible had happened: the PRI had been ousted peacefully. The earthquake was merely one small part of a generation-long transformation.

Fox occupied the National Palace in Mexico City’s Zócalo, but he did not inherit the near-absolute power enjoyed by PRI presidents since the 1930s. His party did not control Congress and, as the traditional vertical structure of government fell apart, state governors exercised greater independence and labor unions slipped from central control. The coherence of PRI rule, however perverted it may have seemed to many Mexicans, vanished. As new centers of power emerged, powerful drug cartels which controlled the traffic of cocaine from Colombia to the United States posed a growing threat to the nation’s security.

In the 2006 presidential election, Fox’s party candidate, Felipe Calderón, was the narrow victor, but his leftist opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, claimed fraud and his supporters blocked Mexico City’s streets for months. To assert his power, Calderón declared war on the drug cartels, with disastrous consequences. The estimates of the number of people killed or disappeared during his six-year term range between 60,000 and 100,000, most of them as a result of territorial wars between rival cartels. These gangs also set out to terrorize the population, bombing nightclubs, hanging bodies from highway bridges, and even leaving the heads of victims outside some schools.

The perception of a breakdown in law and order was one explanation for the PRI’s return to power in 2012: The PRI may have been corrupt, the saying went, but it knew how to govern. It also benefitted from the undisguised support of Mexico’s dominant television group, Televisa. Even then, its presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, was hardly given a national mandate. Because Mexico has only one round of presidential elections (unlike, say, Brazil), Peña Nieto won with just 38.2 percent of the vote, with López Obrador again in second place and Calderón’s own party candidate trailing in third.

At first, Peña Nieto’s boast that he was leading a “new PRI” seemed to carry some weight, above all when he dared to break the exploration monopoly of the country’s oil giant, Pemex, and to challenge the near-monopoly of the telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim. But while a different approach to the drug war resulted in the capture of several leading capos, including the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the number of cartels has multiplied. Further, the old ogre of corruption returned: Peña Nieto’s wife bought a mansion with the help of a prominent businessman, and several PRI governors were caught enriching themselves. For many Mexicans, there was nothing new about this PRI.

Then Donald Trump appeared, with his insults toward Mexicans and his threat to build a wall along the common border. Peña Nieto tried appeasement, inviting Trump for hombre talks in Mexico City, only to find Trump resuming his flailing of Mexico immediately upon his return home. Given blossoming anti-American sentiments, Peña Nieto had no choice but to refuse to pay for any border wall, but he did persuade Trump to engage in talks to renew NAFTA rather than denounce the treaty.

On the eve of this September’s earthquakes, polls showed Peña Nieto’s approval rating at well below 20 percent, lower than any Mexican leader on record.

Will the seismic tremors push Mexico into another political earthquake? There’s reason for skepticism. This Mexico City earthquake, and the earlier major quake in southern Mexico, were less devastating than the 1985 quake, with the number of dead in the low hundreds, not the thousands. While some 40 buildings collapsed in the capital, including the wing of a packed primary school, the city as a whole remained intact, and Mexican authorities were better prepared than in 1985.

Once life returns to normal for all but the earthquakes’ victims, the issue consuming most Mexicans will be next July’s presidential elections. The political earth may again move because the current front-runner is the perennial leftist candidate López Obrador, known throughout Mexico by his initials of AMLO. Because his promises of sweeping economic and social reforms have alarmed the private sector and middle classes, the other three main parties are determined to stop him. But can parties of left, center and right agree on a “unity” candidate? If they fail, as seems likely, López Obrador could win with an even smaller percentage of votes than Peña Nieto won in 2012.

If the actual earthquakes and their aftermath reinforce public disenchantment with the political establishment, AMLO, with his cultivated image of the political outsider, could benefit. But even if by next July the disaster has been largely forgotten, and even if most Mexicans oppose him, enough voters may still opt for the unknown variable of a populist with a radical new message to elect him. And at that point, a new cycle of Mexican political instability will unavoidably begin.

The post Mexico’s ’85 Earthquake Didn’t Start a Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fall foliage and hurricane season go hand in hand in New England. But what few people realize is that the spectacular blazing colors from our hardwood forests are the result of the great hurricane of 1938, which brought 100 mph winds inland to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine 79 years ago on September 21.

The storm that came to be known as “Thirty-Eight” (the system of naming hurricanes didn’t begin until 1953) was the first Category 2 hurricane to reach Vermont and New Hampshire, and it came without warning. Thirty-Eight made landfall on Long Island, crossed the Long Island Sound into Connecticut and Rhode Island, and raced through Massachusetts and Vermont. It had been at least a generation since any hurricane had hit the region, even the coast.

Because of the lack of warning, or preparedness, more than 600 people died, most of them from the storm surge that swept beachfront houses into the sea. Floods and high winds—the fiercest wind was measured near Boston at 186 miles per hour—destroyed roads, bridges, houses, barns, and railroad tracks.

Inland, these winds uprooted nearly 1,000 square miles of forest, ripping holes in the tree canopy ranging from the size of a city yard to as large as 90 acres. And in doing so, the hurricane created a new forest across much of New England.

Most of the people who lived through the hurricane are gone, but I have been fortunate to hear the stories of many of them. One dramatic story came from Fred Hunt, at the time a 14-year-old boy playing hooky in the woods in Rindge, New Hampshire. Late in the day, a huge pine—more than 100 feet tall—was uprooted and landed five steps behind him, its trunk parallel to the ground. Thinking quickly, he scrambled into the space beneath the trunk of the fallen pine and stayed there for 10 minutes while the winds howled mercilessly and blew down every other tree in the forest. When there were no more trees left standing, Fred scrambled through the tangle of downed trees the last half-mile to home.

The white pine that served as Fred’s refuge happened to be growing in that spot because of the history of the area’s land, which was typical of much of rural New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In the 17th and 18th centuries, farmers cleared most of the original forest to grow crops and raise livestock. With the advance of the Industrial Revolution, these farmers left to work in the mills. Starting in 1860, the cleared fields reverted to forests. In New England, there’s no need to replant trees because they happily grow on their own. One of the most prolific colonizers of farm fields is white pine.

So when Thirty-Eight raged through, forests covered 80 percent of the land in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much of that forest was white pine. Before the storm, many rural families saw their woodlots as living bank accounts, where a few trees could be cut and sold when they needed money. Ninety percent of the trees that were blown down were white pine.

With the disaster, the federal government saw a need to get involved. The Great Depression had not yet ended, and in the forested areas of New England the New Deal make-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were well-established. Fearing the kind of fires seen in the West each summer, the U.S. Forest Service directed the WPA and CCC to strip the downed trees of their branches, twigs, and needles to reduce the fire danger. Simultaneously it created the Northeast Timber Salvage Administration to purchase logs from the blowdown. Five times the annual harvest of trees had been blown down in a five-hour period, creating a huge glut of wood. NETSA created a market for the logs and purchased nearly half of the salvageable timber, providing some income to the 30,000 families that otherwise would have lost their woodland bank accounts.

And so, New England’s largest hurricane was followed by its largest logging job, and this one-two punch brought about the forest that we see today. When the towering canopy of white pine blew down, what was left were the seedlings and saplings of deciduous hardwood trees. If they hadn’t been blown down in 1938, those pines might still be there, holding the ground until they died from wind, disease, or logging. Instead, the mix of maple, birch, and oak that relished the new sunlight (having been released from the shade of the pines) grew vigorously. This new forest closely approximates the species mix of the original forest that had greeted the settlers, and its vibrant display of turning leaves attracts leaf peepers from around the globe.

Not all of New England experienced Thirty-Eight the same way. In Vermont, for example, farming had continued well into the 1930s, so only half of the state was covered in forests. So hurricane damage appeared mostly in woodlots on top of ridges and in the sugar maple orchards that produced the springtime crop of maple syrup. Maple syrup was a hugely important crop in Vermont, because dairy farmers used the income from syrup to pay a year’s wages for hired help. With so many sugar orchards laying in ruins, many Vermont farmers had no choice but to get out of farming. The regrowth of the forest began in Vermont 80 years later than in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the process was different because Vermont’s soils are better than those of its neighbors. Vermont’s forest cover has now reached 80 percent, and the vast majority of it is the mix of northern hardwoods—maple, beech, and birch—that makes the hills come alive in the fall.

When I last spoke to Fred Hunt, just months before he died at 87, he said, “I’ve always been a white pine man.” He told me that after graduating with a degree in forestry from the University of New Hampshire, he ran a logging business for 10 years, specializing in thinning pine plantations. He then earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts studying white pine and its effect on the water supply. Along the way, his master’s thesis served as the first management plan for the 58,000-acre forest surrounding Quabbin Reservoir, which provides the drinking water for Boston and 40 other nearby towns. He then taught forest management and managed a large forest deep in the Adirondacks for 10 years before he decided at the age of 54 to make his final career change, moving back to Reading, Vermont and tending his own forest.

Hunt spent a lifetime working to grow superior white pine because it provided a good living and because he loved the practice of forestry. But it’s possible that his lifelong affinity for white pine could have little to do with money or forestry. It could have more to do with an event when he was 14 years old. On that day, as New England’s most destructive hurricane passed through, a white pine saved his life.

The post The 1938 Hurricane That Revived New England’s Fall Colors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am a researcher who studies how people cope with trauma, with a special focus on the first weeks after a traumatic event. I’ve worked with many people who have experienced trauma—from incest survivors to people affected by the 1993 firestorms in Laguna Beach and Malibu. One symptom of acute and post-traumatic stress (PTS) is flashing back to the event—intrusive thoughts and images that pop into your head and cause you to re-experience the trauma. With images of the attacks on the Twin Towers replaying in my mind, I decided I had to study how Americans were coping with 9/11.

Within weeks, I launched a national study with my colleagues from University of California, Irvine and the University of Denver. We designed an online survey to measure how a national sample of more than 2,700 people—who lived in every state and were representative of the U.S. population—were coping with the terrorist attacks. A few weeks after 9/11, we asked people all kinds of questions about their stress levels, social relationships, and fears of future terrorism. We conducted follow-up surveys six times over the next three years so we could track their responses over time.

One of the most surprising findings from our study was that people who watched four or more hours of daily 9/11-related TV in the week following the attacks experienced increases in PTS symptoms over the next three years. Even watching one to three hours of daily 9/11-related coverage put a person at higher risk of experiencing the hallmark PTS symptoms: flashbacks, feeling on edge and hyper-vigilant, and avoidance of anything that reminds one of the trauma.

These findings, and those of other post-9/11 studies, suggest that media exposure may spread the impact of a traumatic event beyond the directly affected area. This goes against what many experts suggest—that indirect media-based exposure to trauma is not clinically relevant for the general public. Indeed, the American Psychiatric Association definition of post-traumatic stress makes clear that only individuals who directly experienced trauma—or whose close loved ones directly experienced trauma—are considered to have been “exposed” to trauma. Without this “exposure,” the acute stress or PTS symptoms experienced by an individual are not considered particularly meaningful for overall well-being. While there have been studies examining how therapists and emergency response workers are impacted by indirect exposure to trauma through their professional duties, there has been little interest in studying whether mass media coverage of a major collective trauma unintentionally spreads the negative impacts beyond the directly affected communities.

The relevance of indirect media exposure became apparent again after last April’s Boston Marathon. In the days following the bombings, my colleagues and I decided to replicate our 9/11 study using media exposure to the Boston Marathon bombings. This time, we wanted to look at all types of media: how much TV people watched, their exposure to disaster-related radio, print, and online news, and their use of social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo in the week following the bombings. We were interested in how social media may have blurred the line between fiction and reality. Unlike traditional media that warns us about the gruesome nature of an image before showing it to us, social media typically display such images without warning.

We also wanted to compare the direct exposure of the bombings to indirect exposure through the media—did these different ways of being “exposed” lead to more or less acute stress? Two weeks after the bombings, we launched another web-based study with more than 4,600 people from all over the country—including nearly 850 people who were in Boston on the day of the bombing.

We expected both groups (people with direct and indirect exposure) to report acute stress symptoms. Surprisingly, the people who consumed significant bombing-related media in the week after the bombings (six or more hours per day) were six times more likely to report high levels of acute stress symptoms than those who were at the Boston Marathon that day. That is, they reported experiencing a wider range of acute stress-related symptoms—flashbacks, feeling anxious, wanting to avoid reminders of the bombings, and feeling like it had not really happened or was a bad dream—than people who were there when the bombs exploded. Even when we accounted for those who might be especially susceptible—for example, people with pre-existing mental illness or people who already watched a lot of TV (and might be drawn to and more distressed by media coverage)—our findings did not change.

What explains this? I suspect that the repetitive nature of media coverage of traumatic events may keep the event (and the feelings associated with it) alive for some people. In contrast, when a person is directly exposed to an event, there can be a sense of closure and relief once the bombs stop exploding and the acute threat has ended. Seeing the same disturbing images over and over on television (or on social media), may repeatedly trigger fears and worrying in some people and make it difficult for them to mentally process the event.

It is important to point out that not everyone responds this way to media coverage. There is a lot of variation in response to trauma. Only some people who consumed lots of media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings developed acute stress symptoms. So I am now studying who is most vulnerable to direct and indirect exposure to traumatic events. If we identify those people who are most affected, we can reach out to them early and try to prevent them from developing problems.

Right after the bombings, the Red Cross put signs up in Boston urging people to limit their exposure to television coverage of the bombings. I think that’s good advice for all of us—we should be safe from harm as we follow what’s happening in the world. We are just beginning to understand the role of the media in shaping our early responses to collective trauma and spreading acute stress beyond the affected area. More research is needed to figure how best to protect people who might be vulnerable to the negative impact of media exposure in the aftermath of disasters.

The post News Junkies Get Traumatized, Too appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m an Okie through and through. My mom’s grandparents founded and settled the town of Graves, Oklahoma; my great-grandpa was postmaster general. Other than a year of school in Wyoming, and a very short and ill-fated move to Washington State, I’ve spent my entire life in and around Norman, a college town of 100,000 (more if you count the students at the University of Oklahoma).

Dealing with tornadoes and their aftermath is an inescapable part of Oklahoma life. We fear the storms for what they can take from us but also respect them for the mercy they sometimes show. There was a tornado a few years ago that destroyed a Love’s Country Store, part of the convenience store chain. The storm took the building, the freezers, and the fridge boxes—but left standing, untouched, in what used to be the middle of the store, the glass ornament display. Not one ornament was knocked over or broken. Why? How? I don’t know. In this most recent storm, a bowling alley was destroyed—except for the back half of one lane. On that lane were 10 pins still standing in the triangle shape, ready for a ball to knock them over.

I have been through too many storms to count, and I have been lucky: I’ve not personally experienced major damage or injury. But I’ve had several close calls.

The closest was when my older daughter Kristen was knee high to a grasshopper. It was about 1986. We were having a barbecue party and poker game at our house when a storm started to form. Inside on the TV, Gary England, every Okie’s favorite weatherman, said, “You folks eight miles east of Norman, I can’t stress how important this is—.” And then the electricity shut off.

We went outside and saw a funnel drop in my front yard. My only thought was, “Oh, shit, 20 people are going to die at my house today.” We couldn’t move or talk or breathe. Fortunately, the storm touched down and went right back up. No one was hurt and nothing damaged. I never want to be any closer.

I have a sign on my fence now that got stuck during a storm; it says something about not being responsible for the death of any horse. It fell from the sky one day years ago, as I was talking with my neighbors after a storm threat had subsided. The sign turned out to be debris from a tornado that about 30 minutes previously had struck Chickasha, a town approximately 30 miles southeast of my house.

We know much more about tornadoes now than when I was a kid. Back then, we’d escape the house and go to my father’s office building on the University of Oklahoma campus, because it had a basement. This could be boring, since we’d be there for hours. In the ’50s and ’60s, there were no portable TVs, cell phones, or even transistor radios, and we didn’t always know when the danger was gone. My siblings and I would pass the time playing a game called “spoons”—even though we often had to play it with pens—until our dog Second had to be taken outside to pee. If the weather looked clear, Dad would let us leave.

These days, when a storm arrives, there is plenty of information. With this most recent tornado, I started taking precautions as soon as I heard it might hit Norman. But as the tornado got underway, the forecasters realized it was going to hit north Norman, not the south side where I live. Then I started worrying about others. My son was in north Norman, and I checked in to make sure he wasn’t playing storm chaser (sometimes he does, regrettably). I have several friends in the tornado path so I started trying to find out about them. They are OK, and so is their property.

But there are so many who aren’t OK this time.

To see so much shock and confusion on the faces of people is heartbreaking. But a time like this also reminds me of why we live here: because we know and can depend upon the people and communities here. During this storm, teachers threw their bodies over children to protect them from a tornado. The testament to their bravery is the fact that while two elementary schools were destroyed, there were only nine child fatalities. On the news is a story about a father who donated huge amounts of diapers, wipes, and baby supplies to the relief effort. He did this because his infant son died of an illness a month ago, and his family didn’t need the supplies. I know the mother of that child: I watched her grow up with my daughter Stephanie.

So I couldn’t think of leaving a place like this. Admittedly, I might have to make an exception for the month of May. This latest F5 tornado, the strongest category of storm, came on May 20 of this year. We had a strong F3 tornado back on May 12, 2003 and another F5 on May 3, 1999. If you look at all three tracks, they are very close. But I’d still be back in June.

After the storm, strangers immediately began clearing debris with other strangers. Folks with chainsaws didn’t have to be asked to take care of trees that were blocking the road. The university immediately opened up dorms to house anybody who needed a place to stay. The other night, people were lined up for more than three hours to drop off various donations. There are waiting lists to volunteer.

One big problem right now in the damage area is the street signs. There are none. Many landmarks are gone too. First responders and insurance people who don’t know the area are getting lost. That slows things down—but there also are plenty of local people to help them find their way. Living here, you don’t need a sign to know you are home.

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