Welcome back to the Pandemic Academy at
the Evergreen State College. I'm Zoltan
Grossman presenting the Resilience
Doctrine: Disaster Co-operativism in the
Climate and Pandemic Crises. This is Part
2, State Authority and Mutual Aid. The
day after Trump's infamous address to
the nation on March 11th, I published
this article in Common Dreams. We've
learned from previous disaster that fear
makes citizens more obedient to
authority. Fear reinforces the super
state as our protector and justifies
oppressive or unequal responses. Trump
and his European clones are using the
so-called "foreign virus" as a xenophobic
rationalization for stronger borders
against immigrants, even though right now
Syrians and Hondurans medically have
much more to fear from contact with
European and US citizens than the other
way around.
The very idea of social distancing
tears at our values of community.
Whereas an earthquake or hurricane may
bring strangers together in a common
cause, a pandemic reinforces neoliberal
individualists -- isolation and
prioritizes our own nuclear family over
our potentially zombie neighbors. The
American mentality of contagion has
historically been fraught with racial
cultural and political exclusion rooted
in red scares and yellow perils. Angel
Island in San Francisco Bay was used as
a center to interrogate and quarantine
Asian immigrants, not as a place of
welcome like Ellis Island usually was
for European immigrants. Anti-Chinese
pogroms here on the west coast including
Olympia and Tacoma were often justified
with claims of banishing leprosy and
other diseases. These irrational fears
run deep in the Western psyche, and when
fear predominates over love and care
conservatism rules. It especially rules
when it harnesses the concept of a white
defensive community that ostracizes
foreign hordes. So I find it a poignant
irony that now the Mexican government
is enforcing border controls in order to
keep US citizens out. So this idea that
we're all in this together, and I've
heard that many many times--and there's
some truth to it, that as human beings
were being challenged by this pandemic
just as we're challenged by climate
change; but we are not all affected
evenly. And later on in the pandemic
Academy you'll be hearing about the
crises facing immigrant communities,
people who are imprisoned and how they
have disproportionate burden, as do
communities of color in the United
States, and working-class people that
don't have the support that other people
do. We have read at Evergreen in the past
as a common read Elaine Scarry's thinking
in the emergency, and she made this very
important observation: one of the things
that seduced people into giving up their
own actions is the claim of emergency.
The government will often make the
spurious claim that because certain
things require very fast action there's
no time for ordinary processes of
deliberation and thinking. I find exactly
the opposite to be the case. Thinking and
emergency action are deeply compatible.
Sometimes that thinking takes the form
of very recognizable deliberative
processes, and many other times we build
all the deliberation into protocol. So
the whole question of the legitimacy of
government actions and how we defer to
the government is very marked in times
of disaster. And disasters, if
mishandled, can challenge the legitimacy
of existing governments and political
systems and strengthened dissent and new
ways of thinking.
Disaster has very much shaped political
outcomes. We can see for example how the earthquake in Nicaragua in 1972 hastened
the Sandinistas evolution that took
power in 1979. In the Soviet Union, we can
very clearly see, and historians
acknowledge, that the Chernobyl meltdown
in 1986 hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union
five years later. The state secrecy, the
treatment of national minorities was
blown out into the open. We can see even
in our own country, um, how this question of
deference to authority really played out
on 9/11. If you remember after the plane
first plane struck the North Tower,
loudspeakers urged the employees in the
South Tower to go back to work. It was
those who disobeyed those loudspeakers
who tended to survive on 9/11. So going
beyond, and even disobeying, normal
procedures is sometimes the only way to
respond to a major disaster when
bureaucracies and politics tend to slow
things down. We heard from one of our
students Cokie Hiraguchi from Japan
who contrasted to schools that reacted
very differently in the critical 50
minutes between the Tohoku earthquake
and the tsunami. One school, the teachers
didn't adequately prepare, believed the
hazard maps ordered their students to
evacuate to an area that wasn't high enough.
Nearly all of them perished. At another
school the students took the lead in
seeking higher ground, and all but a few
survived based on their own judgment.
Saving not only their own lives, but also
those are the adults around them. They
prepared for disasters and were taught
to make decisions for themselves. I think
here in the pandemic and here in the
Pacific Northwest the real heroes are
going to be seen in history as the
biomedical researchers from the Seattle
flu study, who actively violated
government regulations to share their
research that coronavirus had been
spreading undetected for six weeks in
Snohomish County, where it first came
ashore in North America with Patient
Zero. Their ethical decisions set off the
alarm bells that finally got state and
federal agencies into motion. We can also
see the story of Captain Brett Kosher on
the USS Theodore Roosevelt
off Guam, who sent a letter to the navy
pleading for the Navy to
isolate his crew. He was fired for doing
so, and the Pentagon very much put the
mission of the aircraft carrier over
both the health of the crew and the
health of the people of Guam. Where some
of the sailors are being evacuated to
civilian areas instead of the very large
bases on Guam. But this is an example
when the crew cheered on their captain,
this is a very clear example of
defying government authority. Solnit and
many sociologists look at the question
of elite panic during disasters, and
they've documented that ordinary people
are usually pretty calm and rarely panic
in emergencies contrary to the Hollywood
mythology; but elites perceive a threat
from out of control and unruly mobs. So
they create a myth of social panic that
shapes their actions, and they panic as a
result. And that kind of panic reinforces
what I spoke about in part one, an
assumption that human nature is greedy
and animalistic, and an up ending of the
social order can only lead to chaos. And
Solnit points out that hierarchies
and institutions are inadequate to
circumstances. They are often what fails
in such crises. Civil society is what
succeeds, not only in an emotional
demonstration of altruism and mutual aid,
but also in a practical mustering of
creativity and resources to meet the
challenge. She also points out that a lot
of the myths about the the murders and
chaos in the Superdome were very much
part of this elite panic scenario. That
for instance, New Orleans gang members
were not murdering people in the
Superdome, but according to a woman who was there at the time they were the ones
getting juice for the babies. They were
the ones getting clothes for the people
who had walked through that water. They
were the ones fanning the old people,
because that's what moved the gangster
guys the most: the plight of the old
people. I've heard very similar stories
from Brazil over the past week,
of gang members I guess finding their
sense of responsibility to their their
community. What was interesting about the
Coast Guard after Katrina is it refused
to play along with the playbook of elite
panic. And their commanders were instead
ordered to be flexible, to work with the
local people as partners, not as
potential threats. And they have won
historically high praise from the people
of New Orleans. There was also a civilian
effort the Cajun Navy rural folks rescue
volunteers who came in with boats not
only after Katrina in 2005, but also
hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017.
I mentioned Occupy Sandy, the outgrowth
of the Occupy movement in New York that
stepped up when Hurricane Sandy
struck New York in 2012. Here you've got
a very telling photo of FEMA workers
from a very disorganized federal agency
that was not responding well, actually
getting their food and coffee from the
activists. And that, I think, really shows
kind of the failures of some of the
top-down kind of responses, and some of
the successes if they had been resourced
more in particular of Occupy Sandy. I've
studied this quite a bit and I'm looking
at this now in the last few weeks when
it comes to indigenous resilience. That
Native Nations have gone through
historic traumas, wars, epidemics,
colonization, boarding schools,
industrializatio--but they've managed to
retain a sense of community through
these historic traumas and kept it as a
core value. And right now tribal nations
are using their sovereignty to take
proactive protective kind of steps on
coronavirus. I've looked at this in the
context of climate justice at Evergreen.
We produced the book Asserting Native
Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous
Nations Face the Climate Crisis. I wrote
the University of Washington press book
Unlikely Alliances:
Native Nations of White Communities
Join to Defend Rural Lands. And looked
at things like the fight of Native
Nations and farmers and ranchers against
the Keystone Excel and Dakota access
pipelines. Against oil and coal trains in
the northwest. Also looking at our first
book, the orange one, really looked at
alliances built in climate change
adaptation. What I found interesting more
recently is how disaster resilience is
another very rich area of alliance
building. That when a landslide cuts you
off from the rest of the state tribes
and the white neighbors, the local
governments that they usually do not get
along with have only each other to rely
on. And in many ways the tribes are ahead
of these non-native nations sharing
their resources such as fire trucks,
doing joint planning up at Swinomish for
example about some of the flooding
that's growing worse because of climate
change. I've also looked at the same
question in New Zealand the last couple
of years, looking at the response of the
indigenous people the Maori and their
Marai communities to floods, to
earthquakes, and found that it was far
superior to the New Zealand governmen,t
the Red Cross. A civil defense of feeding
the people of having their Marai be
civil defense shelters, and of
integrating Maori cultural protocols and
knowledge into disaster resilience and
being welcomed very much by the
non-native community there. I found that
fascinating. I think more recently both in North
America and in New Zealand, we've really
seen the indigenous communities taking
the lead and turning to each other.
Tibal communities know death by
pandemic according to Linda Mapes
of the Seattle Times. "As history
threatens to repeat itself with the
menace of the novel coronavirus, tribal
communities are turning to their
teachings and one another to protect
themselves amid what they call a
near-total
failure of federal resources to help,
despite solemn promises and treaties. No
one is waiting in these communities for
someone else to come to the rescue.
Response to the threat of the virus by
travelers has been Swift and aggressive.
Tribal governments are sovereign in
their territory with broad emergency
powers, and they're using them." And I
think we've seen the response as soon as
Trump talked about a travel ban from
Europe, I knew this meme was coming. And
sure enough it came from Dallas Goldtooth: "Let me get this straight,
Europeans are banned from coming to
America because of their chance of
spreading disease amongst the population?
Qell ain't that some shit." says every
Native in America. The original
pandemics that decimated the populations
in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere
came from European settlement. And
Washington tribes, as the earliest hit in
North America by this pandemic, have
taken amazing steps to respond. The Lummi
Nation built the first field hospital
independent of the feds. The Quilieute, Makah, many of the reservations very
early on cut themselves off to present
prevent the spread of the virus into
their communities. And we see this all over
the country. Navajo Nation which is being
pretty hard hit right now, putting out a
meme campaign to their youth. "Wash your
hands, physical distance, protect the
elders." That there's this cultural sense
of responsibility and mutual aid
ingrained through the generations. And
that in a sense I think is a model to
non-native society. And non-native
society can-can echo that idea in mutual
aid--this idea of solidarity not charity.
A voluntary reciprocal exchange of
resources and services respecting and
learning from each other in a horizontal
way, instead of top to bottom help or
charity in a vertical way. There's
multiple routes and many different
movements: socialist and
anarchist movements, labor unions
african-american networks as we'll hear
about later on, churches, neighborhood
groups--all rooted in ancient traditional
practices. So mutual aid prefigures a
healthier society of resistance and
regeneration. And I see it as drawing
from the past to build our future in the
present. So it's not just about natural
disasters. There's disaster in everyday
life, in everyday capitalism as Solnit
points out in in her book Paradise Built
in Hell. The history of disaster
demonstrates that most of us are social
animals hungry for connection as well as
for purpose and meaning. It also suggests
that if this is who we are then everyday
life in most places is a disaster that
disruptions sometimes give us a chance
to change. So you can look at, for
instance, the free breakfast program of
the Black Panthers, movements of homeless
people like camp Quixote in Olympia, as
being places where that kind of slow
motion mutual aid is almost has
revolutionary application. I think it's
even amazing how the Seattle freeze in
recent weeks has been challenged. I love
this article in the Seattle Times
"Coronavirus sparks an epidemic of people
helping people in Seattle." Wow, that means
that we are really in a different
situation if the Seattle freeze has been
melted away just a little bit. And part
of that is even though social distancing, as
I pointed out early on, is in some ways
isolating us from each other it's also a
form of solidarity. Reframing social
distancing, calling it the
physical distancing and social
solidarity movement, that way we actually
need each other. So not being around each
other is a way to show our love for each other.
And there's so many examples of this: the
Masked Crusaders, artists donating masks,
tribal artists and his generation in
Seattle, donating masks to Seattle Indian
Health Board.
Crafters making masks all over the place.
This is some
very grassroots and is happening all
over the tree. Safeguarding the elderly,
having different shopping hour,s looking
at reforms in nursing homes so that
Kirkland disaster is not repeated. Doing
drive-by birthday parties for an 84 year
old granny in Alabama. I mean these
things should be done all the time
anyway, and so maybe we'll come out of
this with a better understanding of
supporting the elderly. In our class
we studied the Chicago heat wave of 1995
and found of course that lower-income
neighborhoods had a higher death toll,
which you'd expect, but Latino immigrant
communities had a lower death toll than
us-born neighborhoods because they
checked on their elders more. We can see
networks delivering essential
supplies from the food banks, school
lunches for kids now at home, no health
supplies. We're going to hear later on
about the food bank shortages that are
expected to hit Washington State, and we
should really all be supporting the
Thurston County Food Bank right now.
The Tacoma mutual aid collective has
Saturday family support pick up for food.
There are movements all over for rent
strikes, for stopping evictions,
cancelling student debt. This is a rent
strike in Montreal, a New York College
rally. There are a number of websites
that are mobilizing these kind of things
in the pandemic. We have unemployment
relief and public health insurance
coming even more to the fore, especially
with unemployment causing so many
millions of people to lose their health
insurance. We see a lot more activism in
protecting rather than demonizing the
homeless people, in the homeless
communities in various cities. And it's
just incredible to me how the City of
Seattle could drag its feet for so many
years and months about expanding
shelters place, and then
saying that there's not enough money or
resources, and then voila overnight
beginning to make moves in that
direction because of the pandemic. It's
very dangerous that there might be a
twinning of anti-homeless hatred and the
pandemic. And I think that that's another
thing that activists are trying to
alleviate. And of course people doing
work around domestic violence are facing
new challenges when home is not a place
of safety, and people are being ordered
to stay at home. And so this is a whole
other area where people can be helping.
People, including evergreen students, can
be helping in many of these various
areas. The Center for community based
learning in action has some ideas on
what to do, and we'll be hearing those. Of
course we have a lot of gratitude
towards the health care workers who are
facing so many shortages and so much
disease and death themselves. These are
some anonymous signs at Providence St.
Pete in Olympia. Naomi Klein
said we're in a moment of revelation,
where we're all feeling so much
gratitude towards people who do the
labor of care. Our interdependence is
being made visible for better and worse.
We see all the singing together whether
it's the banging of pots and pans, or
seeing opera in Italy, singing leathern
Cohen songs in Montreal. On the west side
of Olympia
there's the Woodard Lane co-housing, that
every night now at 7:30 everyone just
gets out of their windows and doors and
starts howling like coyotes. There are
coyotes next door in the ravine. So
that's something that could spread to
the rest of Olympia. I hear they're doing
it on the northeast side at 8 p.m.,
doing it after sunset. It's a way to
express that kind of solidarity and
love and the time of coronavirus. And I
offered a video of this and I hope you
can play it, and maybe all unmute
yourselves and howl along, and
make this a practice.
Olimpia is a pretty amazing place and
already we've seen a lot of mutual aid
campaigns. We see the Olympia Mutual
Aid Collective, and you should go on
their Facebook page. The Thurston
community aid for Covid 19. What some of
these groups have done is they have set
up Google Spreadsheets, so people can
both offer aid and request aid. I
know that other groups Washpirg for
instance on campus, have been doing very
similar things. Common stash, mutual aid
in so-called Olympia, both offering and
receiving aid. The
Evergreen community Covid 19 support
group, everybody should be if who has a
Facebook account to be looking at this.
And there's a lot of online activism
going on. There was a digital rally I
believe on March 29th. It called for
health as the top priority for all
people, with no exception. Provide
economic relief directly to the people.
And they called the "people's bailout."
Rescue workers and communities, not
corporate executives. Make a down payment
on a regenerative economy while
preventing future crises. These are some
of the demands that are coming out. So, in
conclusion, I urge people to think ahead
proactively to disasters rather than
responding to them. Preparing for the
inevitable crisis, whether it's from the
from the climate change or a pandemic, or
some other...an earthquake. To not leave
emergency planning to the privatizers.
To actually get, I think we could call
them green jobs, in the Red Cross, DHS,
FEMA, state and local agencies. To blow
the whistles. To deny those jobs to the
people who would exploit society after
disaster. Propose alternate disaster
planning around the public sector,
economic equality,
environmental sustainability. As Naomi Klein
says, "We need to develop information
redundancies, new tools of civil
disobedience that allow us to disrupt at
a distance. Not be relying on corporate
platforms to facilitate our
communications.
I believe the plug will be pulled social
media gets cut off." So to not be just
relying on Facebook in order to have
this kind of mutual aid conversation.
Breaking down barriers. Immediately after
disasters people are more open to a
cooperative message and policies. I'm
from Wisconsin in the Midwest, there's a
barn raising culture of people coming
together to do mutual labor. It's the individualized competitive
models dependent on globalized corporate
supply lines that are the least equipped
for survival. The normal society that
we're all trying to return to we have to
remember actually cause those horrible
wildfires in the Amazon and Australia and
California. We can't rely on FEMA or the
CDC or other feds to rescue us. We need
to be talking about networks of local
social relationships that can help to
break down ethnic racial barriers beyond
just sandbagging rivers or delivering
food. But there's one cautionary note is
that mutual aid isn't a substitute for
effective government. President George
Bush talked about the thousand points of
light that volunteers can carry this
burden. But in a way our volunteerism is
to be used as an excuse for
government to cut budgets for social
needs, as it has been. And it's a
conservative argument that church or NGO
volunteers will take care of it without
big government. And the climate and
pandemic crisis show expose the failures
of the state, but also show the need for
the state to protect the people, and
mobilize enormous resources quickly. Such
as using the defense production act for
ventilators. That's not something that
grassroots mutual aid people could
necessarily do on our own. And I think
one of the primary areas that we need to
be discussing in the next month, is
making the kind of cooperation we're
seeing come out of the pandemic last
beyond the immediate crisis. Beyond the
weeks or months of the disaster. Oftentimes there'll be a flood, there'll
be in hearth quake people will cooperate
but then it goes back to so-called
"normal." But I think that cooperation can
be institutionalized. And a good example
is Camp Quixote which started in 2007
downtown, went to various churches who
agreed to shelter the homeless, but then
became Quixote village: a tiny home
community where some of the people could
live in better conditions So, this kind
of community work blurring the
distinctions between service work and
activism is going to be superior to just
political agitation. And Klein points out
that moments of crisis can also be
moments where we catapult ourselves
forward. People are wondering when things
are going to return to normal, but we
always have to remember that normal was
a crisis. Normal is deadly. Its
transformation that we need.
 
 
And so I think this article, How to build
mutual aid that will last after the
corona virus pandemic, is really the
conversation that we need to be starting
now, instead of thinking everything will
get back to normal, because things
could end up getting back to better. So
in summary, what I see as the contrast
between what I talked about in part one
the Shock Doctrine versus the Resilience
Doctrine--private property versus public
ownership, the profit motive versus
community motive, competition versus
cooperation, austerity versus wealthy
paying their fair share, private versus
public health care, planning for growth
and sprawl versus sustainable planning,
fossil fuels and nuclear versus green
energy...I think that this is all very
evident, that resilience is the way
forward. And as I've been saying now for
months.
I think evergreen the Evergreen State
College is the ideal place to be
studying this future in the present. That
that if Evergreen promoted itself as "the
resilience college" to develop resilience
strategies for recovery and regeneration
at different scales. Resilience of
individuals to heal from harm and lead a
healthier life, resilience of communities
to recover from historical trauma and
revitalize cultures, resilience of the
planet to reverse environmental and
climate crises and regenerate life and
that framework could be seen as
Resilience: Healing People, Communities
and the Planet. In conclusion I want to read
this this verse by Donna Ashworth that's
circulating quite a bit. And I think sums
up a lot of what I'm trying to say.
"History will remember when the world
stopped and the flight stayed on the
ground and the cars parked on the street
and the trains didn't run. History will
remember when the schools closed and the
children stayed indoors, and the medical
staff
walk towards the fire and they didn't
run. History will remember when the
people sang on their balconies in
isolation, but so very much together
in courage and song. History will
remember when the people fought for
their old and their weak
protected the vulnerable by doing
nothing at all. History will remember
when the virus left and the houses
opened and the people came out and
hugged and kissed and started again
kinder than before." And I think that that
that phrase 'kinder than before 'in your
discussion we could deal with any
questions, but two that I'd want to bring
out: is how is the pandemic revealed the
states needed rules and unneeded rules?
And how can mutual aid fill the gaps or
not, and prefigure this kinder society
that was talked about in the poem? So
thank you. I appreciate the time, and look
forward in keeping in discussion with
you. And please contact me with any
reactions, or any ideas. Thank you so much, and stay well.
