This is a work in progress. Words fall down. When they don’t make a useful shape, they are swept away for rearrangement another day.
“The result of their inability to remain silent in the face of such a monumental tragedy is a testament to their courage. Their words, most of them tapped out at keyboards and launched into the ethers, are part of the historical record much as diaries, journals, and private letters were for our forebears. These contributors share a bond that only those who experienced Hurricane Katrina can ever truly understand, although in the writing of these pieces they clearly hoped that someone, somewhere, would at least try.”
– from the introduction to A Howling In the Wires, edited by Sam Jasper (RIP) and Mark Folse
Following Katrina, Sam referred to me as the Keeper of Days. Through every major life event, I have marked days and their associated events. The invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the first Gulf War, 9/11, Bush II, the second Gulf War, Katrina, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, COVID, and now our rapidly emergent dystopia. When it started to feel like Keeper of Years, I questioned why I do it. I initially attributed it to compulsiveness, then conversely an anxiety control mechanism, or perhaps prisoner-style timekeeping, but came to the conclusion that it is just a combination of the history student, mathematician, and conscientious observer in me attempting to get a sense of things and inform (myself mainly). How long can and do human fuckups last? How do they unfold, in what magnitudes, and when along their journey do things improve or worsen? Why do disasters begin in the first place? What led up to them? The macro, the micro, and every sub-process that constitutes the entirety of the whole sad thing. And veterans know that the disaster isn’t the event itself. That’s just Day 0. The disaster is every day that comes after.
Many are still experiencing Katrina twenty years later.
But I get ahead of myself.
I wasn’t always like this. My earliest memories are from Kuwait in the late 1970s and some of the most vivid are those awful green curtains, brown corduroy flared dungarees, and staring at the television during the deposition of the Shah of Iran followed by the signing of the Camp David Accords several months later. Bombs began flying overhead between Iran and Iraq the following year; Kuwait began taking in a number of refugees from favorite nations all over Arabia and their conflicts continued to play out in exile to the detriment of many expatriates. You may understand why the phrase “collateral damage” soon entered my nascent vocabulary.
And the moment I could put pen to paper, I began to write everything down.
Don’t get me wrong – I got my fair share and more of Dinky Dog (shut up), Paddington Bear, Godzilla, and Strawberry Shortcake (I said shut up) and play dates with other children. My parents constantly ensured our safety and I grew up wanting for almost nothing. But I have to hand it to the folks for not sugarcoating and shielding me from the world’s realities when most kids my age weren’t encouraged to feed themselves and tie their own shoelaces much less consider geopolitics and its impact on their daily lives. Collateral damage like them. I don’t know, maybe those kids were better off not knowing.
But we were safe, right? None of this could happen to rich little Kuwait protected by western oil company elites and moneyed interests the world over, right? There is watching and knowing what happens to other people, and then there is going through it yourself. It really has no density until you are the statistic, and in a way few saw coming. In lieu of depressing all of us with the details, you can go read what I’ve penned about how our Kuwait chapter ended at your convenience. And then came Katrina and on and on.
The bigger tragedy is that time passes and compounds experiences, while selectively helping downplay and even romanticize them at the same time. As I have said before, “… [the experiences] are now a part of the amorphous past, which increasingly blurs the farther we hurtle into the future” towards the fresh horrors challenges that await us.
So, I am going to take a page from my parents’ playbook and not sugarcoat for and shield you. There are no Thoughts and Prayers that can keep away the inevitable because it is the direct and measurable consequence of our (in)action. If I ever hear the phrases “Let’s hope for the best” and “Power corrupts” again, it would be too soon. Power corrupts corruptible people and each one of us has to painstakingly create the circumstances for Hope to grow and bloom. “Our fate is your fate,” read a poster or someone said in a town hall meeting somewhere in Louisiana after Katrina. The unthinkable can and will happen to you and your loved ones. Nowhere is safe and no one is coming to help you, not unless you make it so with thought and effort every damned day for the rest of your lives.
A notion that keeps peeking out from behind my statements above is that you are not alone. Yes, I did say “no one is coming to help you,” but that and the number of people around you who are in the same situation are not the same thing. They/We are understandably on edge, untrusting, and downhearted, and will view any new partnerships with skepticism and as coldly transactional. And yet what I have also witnessed firsthand during the worst of times is the considerable power of like-minded community. If humans possess anything, it’s an innate desire for Tomorrow. We will drag ourselves across sharp glass protruding through hot coals to make it even one more day. Harnessing that energy in those who share your values and directing it towards accountability, growth, change, and progress is then the new task at hand.
How do we do it? Ah, that’s the trick. Sorry to ruin the vibe by bringing up logistics, but there is no way to build community other than through being brave, vulnerable, and there, for each person at a time, demanding the same from them, and fighting for those without your privilege. Through personal and joint “thought and effort every damned day for the rest of your lives.”
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To myself I then say – Why wouldn’t I write and keep writing? As an incurable scribe who has a knack for being in the right place at the wrong time, and didn’t want anyone else to tell my story, our story, why wouldn’t I write? When these things occur to a person who really understands what is happening, gives a damn about Everything, and values knowledge and human progress more than Anything, why wouldn’t I write? There is no other job.
That’s enough for Part 1.
