Here in the Española valley of northern New Mexico, we’ve now experienced serious displacements cause by fire and ice. Our reactions to each were very different.
More than a decade ago, when the Cerro Grande forest fire threatened Los Alamos, and the employment of people in the valley, people came together. The evacuated either moved to shelters or in with friends. The people responsible, the US Forest Service, held daily news conferences on the progress of putting out the fire. The individual tragedies, the lost homes, were part of a greater story, the threat to a national laboratory that contained radioactive materials.
The loss of natural gas for five or six days when morning temperatures hovered around zero isolated people. No matter how drafty the houses, people had to stay in them. There were no public areas to visit, no restaurants selling warm meals: they were all closed to conserve electricity and few employees would have come to work if they’d tried to open.
One man in Española couldn’t visit his wife in the hospital. His house varied between 30 and 35 degrees. He was trapped by the need to stay home to protect what he could from the threat of broken pipes, so his wife would have a place to return to. We all were trapped by our plumbing, and even the rich discovered they weren’t immune from poor architectural design.
The people responsible, New Mexico Gas Company, cancelled press conferences. The local media, headquartered a hundred miles to the south in Albuquerque, didn’t begin to cover the story until after the Super Bowl, and then only after people in Taos, angry the gas promised for Sunday hadn’t materialized, had begun to rebel and created something to be televised. Pictures of frozen water simply weren’t as compelling to the national media as those of a raging fire.
The greater story had no overriding national interest - the national laboratory has a different source for its natural gas. It was simply one of the compounded consequence of individual attempts to stay warm, a variation of what we now call irrational exuberance.
When cold hit Texas the week before the Super Bowl, furnaces worked longer. The utilities responded to the stress in places like Dallas by instituting rolling brown outs in the more remote areas, especially the western part of the state that produced the natural gas shipped into New Mexico.
When outside temperatures fell way below zero, as low as -18 by the Santa Fe airport on February 3rd, furnaces worked harder, and the natural gas company responded by cutting off service to more remote areas to keep urban centers warm.
Everyone felt they were the victim of someone else, and most responded by denying the reality of the problem. Instead of keeping one part of a house habitable and keeping the rest just warm enough to stop pipes from breaking, people insisted on keeping their entire houses the usual temperature and continuing their usual lives. They were upset they couldn’t have their daily hot showers.
While some people responded to the calls for conservation, my boss’s mother told me she didn’t turn down her heat because she didn’t want to get sick. Her son told me he had turned up his heat because the house had began to cool between furnace cycles.
The economy began to define the seriousness of the disaster, not nature. When the gas went out the day before a normal payday, some people in Taos bought 20 space heaters each, while one of our employees in Española didn’t have enough spare cash left to buy one while they were in stock.
The people in the gas company operations center had no awareness of the difficulty of bringing the gas back in rural areas where poverty dominates; they were only concerned with protecting the physical plant from a complete breakdown. The governor, Susana Martinez, had only been in office for a few weeks and had no staff to respond.
It’s too simple to dismiss her feeble response as that of a Tea Partier who doesn’t believe in government. When things become extreme, human responses tend to overrule ideology. During the Cerro Grande fire, a libertarian, Gary Johnson, was governor. One interview I remember was one in which he lamented his powerless to do anything about a raging wild fire - picking up a shovel and tossing some dirt simply wasn’t enough.
But things were different. It wasn’t just the differences between fire and ice, spring and deep winter. There was also a difference in our expectations.
In the intervening decade, many had become more and more isolated in media created bubbles that mediated their responses to reality. An unexpected disaster that challenged the security of that bubble was more than a discomfort, it was a threat to a whole set of cultural values, and they responded, as people often do with severe threats, with denial, with an attempt to maintain normality.
The media, who created the bubble, especially those who broadcast the more demagogic commentators, were enamored of the power of social media in Egypt. Some began to show people how to turn on their own meters after the utility company had turned them off before relighting each appliance that was safe. Meantime, other stations were showing the number of substandard furnaces the technicians couldn’t legitimately relight.
The genuine risk of an explosion or fire wasn’t part of a world that operated like a Hollywood script where real poverty doesn’t exist. My next door neighbor’s gas had no pressure. He’s a middle class engineer, but I was still thankful he was at work when the gas company arrived and wasn’t the one to troubleshoot the problem. The federal regulation on orderly relighting after a mass outage suddenly made sense, even if it didn’t fit the current political world view.
Since the gas has been restored and morning temperatures are above zero, people with money and enough education to understand the physics of heat and cold, aren’t talking about what to do to prevent another disaster. They know they can’t do anything about Texas or out-of-state utilities. They’re wondering how to protect themselves, how many space heaters to buy, if a generator is necessary, what to do to protect the pipes.
More than likely, they also live in houses and have mortgages, which means they have insurance which will pay for some of the damages and repairs.
Those living in trailers are worse off. If they have insurance, it’s probably so low the payments won’t begin to cover the damages. If they bought something used or live in an old house, there’s probably no insurance. In the next disaster, they will be dismissed as constant victims by those living in the bubble because they didn’t have the minimum assets to respond.
Between fire and ice, the sense of helplessness is different. In both cases, we were the victim of human decisions, in one case a single individual who OK’d the controlled the burn, in the other the compounded consequence of individuals responding to unprecedented cold. Only in the second was the failure of the response also seen as the deliberate failure of humans with no possibility of redemption because we now have a governor who doesn’t believe anything can or should be done and has spent her time since the heat returned placing blame on everyone else.
Notes:
Albuquerque Journal. "Frozen Out," 4 February 2011, on the purchase of space heaters in Taos.
Associated Press. "Fear of System Failure Forced Brutal Choices," 7 February 2011, on the gas company operations center.
KRQE. "Relights Start Slowly in Espanola," 7 February 11, station website, on the man in Española with the sick wife.
Showing posts with label Culture Breakdown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture Breakdown. Show all posts
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Anger
After World War II, psychologists tried to use the work of Freud to explain that of Hitler. They began with the simple model, drawn from physics and the steam engine, that human energy must be channeled. If it is not, it is diverted into aggression. Without a safety valve, that aggression becomes bigotry and mass hatred.
Since last summer, when people began admitting the economy had problems, there has been an increasing number of examples of undiffused aggression when people showed up at John McCain or Barak Obama rallies primed to vent their anger. More recently, political groups have been trying to manipulate that rage to destroy Obama’s presidency.
Many in the media are trying to identify what they call the astroturfers, the lobbyists and political spokesmen who hope to gain from public demonstrations of anarchy. Others are saying the anger is legitimate and we must listen to what demonstrators are saying. Still others are suggesting it isn’t what they say that matters, but that they are so easily enraged.
With all our sophisticated knowledge of non-verbal communication and the deconstruction of language, we sometimes lose our ability to know when to listen to what people are trying to say and when to probe deeper.
When Timonthy McVeigh said he blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 because the federal government had overstepped its powers when it attacked Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, he believed what he said. Many of the people who use their web sites as journals of self-loathing are trying to understand themselves. We would we wise to overcome our Morsberger responses and listen when people are trying to say something we have a hard time understanding.
When what we hear is pure rage it’s harder to listen. If you confronted some people at public rallies who are attacking Obama with accusations of racism they would deny they were bigots because they don’t see genocide as a solution. Their rage is simply looking for an outlet, and they take up whatever slogans are available. As Marshall McLuhan would have said, their medium is their message.
The important social question is why are so many people so angry? Even if you discount those who have been maladjusted since childhood, there is still a great deal of raw emotion floating in the ether. Everyone has a pet theory he or she can trot out - it’s the lack of jobs, it’s the role models of the media, it’s the loss of social mobility and status, it’s jealousy, sexual inadequacy, the abandonment of a religion that confronts human weakness.
My particular hobbyhorse is that we’re back at the corner Twelfth and Clairmount.in Detroit on July 23, 1967, before everyone agreed the cause of urban unrest that summer was racism rather than something structural in our economy.
We’ve now gone through forty years, while the economy has been contracting for uneducated workers, using race to argue about allocating the remaining jobs, and elected a president who made clear he wouldn’t continue the tactics of men like Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson who navigated those treacherous waters.
In a way people are right when they say we are post-racial. It doesn’t mean people are any more tolerant or that Blacks have any more opportunity, but that the rage that fed the urban riots in 1967 has now spread to the general population and cannot be dismissed as bigotry. We are challenged to confront the problems we evaded back then, but like every time a cultural problem is ignored, when we face it again, our tools have devolved, this time when decisions were made to export our manufacturing and devalue our belief in a community supported by taxes.
Since last summer, when people began admitting the economy had problems, there has been an increasing number of examples of undiffused aggression when people showed up at John McCain or Barak Obama rallies primed to vent their anger. More recently, political groups have been trying to manipulate that rage to destroy Obama’s presidency.
Many in the media are trying to identify what they call the astroturfers, the lobbyists and political spokesmen who hope to gain from public demonstrations of anarchy. Others are saying the anger is legitimate and we must listen to what demonstrators are saying. Still others are suggesting it isn’t what they say that matters, but that they are so easily enraged.
With all our sophisticated knowledge of non-verbal communication and the deconstruction of language, we sometimes lose our ability to know when to listen to what people are trying to say and when to probe deeper.
When Timonthy McVeigh said he blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 because the federal government had overstepped its powers when it attacked Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, he believed what he said. Many of the people who use their web sites as journals of self-loathing are trying to understand themselves. We would we wise to overcome our Morsberger responses and listen when people are trying to say something we have a hard time understanding.
When what we hear is pure rage it’s harder to listen. If you confronted some people at public rallies who are attacking Obama with accusations of racism they would deny they were bigots because they don’t see genocide as a solution. Their rage is simply looking for an outlet, and they take up whatever slogans are available. As Marshall McLuhan would have said, their medium is their message.
The important social question is why are so many people so angry? Even if you discount those who have been maladjusted since childhood, there is still a great deal of raw emotion floating in the ether. Everyone has a pet theory he or she can trot out - it’s the lack of jobs, it’s the role models of the media, it’s the loss of social mobility and status, it’s jealousy, sexual inadequacy, the abandonment of a religion that confronts human weakness.
My particular hobbyhorse is that we’re back at the corner Twelfth and Clairmount.in Detroit on July 23, 1967, before everyone agreed the cause of urban unrest that summer was racism rather than something structural in our economy.
We’ve now gone through forty years, while the economy has been contracting for uneducated workers, using race to argue about allocating the remaining jobs, and elected a president who made clear he wouldn’t continue the tactics of men like Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson who navigated those treacherous waters.
In a way people are right when they say we are post-racial. It doesn’t mean people are any more tolerant or that Blacks have any more opportunity, but that the rage that fed the urban riots in 1967 has now spread to the general population and cannot be dismissed as bigotry. We are challenged to confront the problems we evaded back then, but like every time a cultural problem is ignored, when we face it again, our tools have devolved, this time when decisions were made to export our manufacturing and devalue our belief in a community supported by taxes.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
School Shootings
Gun violence has become so common, it rarely stays in the news for more than a few days. The ones that shocked me, Columbine and Virginia Tech, were the ones that could not be dismissed as individual anomalies but indicated institutional failure.
Most of us survived high school, and wondered what on earth was going on in Littleton. Some of the initial explanations, since disproved by Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass, were the ones that resonated with graduates who knew first hand the status system that allowed one group to scapegoat another or led people to feel persecuted when they were simply overlooked like the strongly religious.
But, we think, something had to fail for routine nastiness or teenage angst to propel Eric Harris into buying automatic weapons and luring Dylan Klebold into his maelstrom. Society’s verdict that they were psychopaths beyond help simply offers a self-serving label in place of recognizing a cultural or institutional failure.
At Virginia Tech we know a lot more, because the parents and school did not blind themselves to Seung-Hui Cho’s problems as people had done in Colorado. They simply had no idea what to do with someone who had stalked people and been diagnosed with mental problems, but could not be institutionalized or even expelled on probability.
The part that shocked me was the role of the creative writing program. Art is supposed to exist as a means people use to externalize and contain their demons, to explore what they know is inadmissible We know the biographies of too many published writers who drank or drugged themselves to death to still believe art is a cure, but we do still think it is a way to explore our worst feelings without letting them become too destructive.
I’ve never taken a creative writing class, and fall into that group that is skeptical about what possible job market a middling school like Virginia Tech hopes to serve with an entire major in creative writing and just what future they see for their graduates after they have provided themselves with employment.
I’ve taught English composition and realize the necessity of helping students learn to write a decent sentence and become knowledgeable enough about their writing to be able to edit themselves. I always stayed with prosaic, factual assignments because I believe the process is the same for all writing - poetry, novels, or essays - and it’s easier to critique something the writer is not personally involved with than something that has required they reveal their feelings.
Louis Menard’s recent article in the New Yorker suggests the central methodology in many creative writing programs is public, group criticism. He makes classes sound more like the self-accusatory sessions of the communists and evangel prayer meetings, than anything I would tolerate.
Such group sessions might possibly work in the sort of summer sessions and graduate programs where each member has to first prove him or herself to be capable writer to be admitted. Such criteria are not possible in a state undergraduate program. Interviews with his classmates make it sound like Cho was exposed to the voices of the very unthinking, conventional students who were first suspected of persecuting Harris and Klebold.
One instructor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her classes because she thought he was "menacing" and wrote a letter for the record to the department chairman, Lucinda Roy, who in turn notified school authorities. Another instructor, Lisa Norris, asked the dean’s office about him and was told he had mental problems.
His male play writing teacher, Edward Falco, was less bothered and simply recognized Cho’s writing wasn’t "good" and that he probably took the courses to find a means of communicating.
Writing requires risk taking. A school that turns homework into an opportunity to enforce conformity by reporting deviance betrays the student. The fact Giovanni and Norris were correct in perceiving danger does not negate the ways their reactions and those of their students contributed to Cho’s growing sense of isolation. They, and everyone involved, should know the dangers of liberating the imagination in a creative writing program and either know how to respond or not offer the courses.
Notes:
My memories of comments at the time by Virginia Tech instructors and students confirmed with Wikipedia.
Cullen, Dave. Columbine, 2009.
Menand, Louis. "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?," New Yorker 8 June 2009.
Kass, Jeff. Columbine: A True Crime Story, 2009.
Most of us survived high school, and wondered what on earth was going on in Littleton. Some of the initial explanations, since disproved by Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass, were the ones that resonated with graduates who knew first hand the status system that allowed one group to scapegoat another or led people to feel persecuted when they were simply overlooked like the strongly religious.
But, we think, something had to fail for routine nastiness or teenage angst to propel Eric Harris into buying automatic weapons and luring Dylan Klebold into his maelstrom. Society’s verdict that they were psychopaths beyond help simply offers a self-serving label in place of recognizing a cultural or institutional failure.
At Virginia Tech we know a lot more, because the parents and school did not blind themselves to Seung-Hui Cho’s problems as people had done in Colorado. They simply had no idea what to do with someone who had stalked people and been diagnosed with mental problems, but could not be institutionalized or even expelled on probability.
The part that shocked me was the role of the creative writing program. Art is supposed to exist as a means people use to externalize and contain their demons, to explore what they know is inadmissible We know the biographies of too many published writers who drank or drugged themselves to death to still believe art is a cure, but we do still think it is a way to explore our worst feelings without letting them become too destructive.
I’ve never taken a creative writing class, and fall into that group that is skeptical about what possible job market a middling school like Virginia Tech hopes to serve with an entire major in creative writing and just what future they see for their graduates after they have provided themselves with employment.
I’ve taught English composition and realize the necessity of helping students learn to write a decent sentence and become knowledgeable enough about their writing to be able to edit themselves. I always stayed with prosaic, factual assignments because I believe the process is the same for all writing - poetry, novels, or essays - and it’s easier to critique something the writer is not personally involved with than something that has required they reveal their feelings.
Louis Menard’s recent article in the New Yorker suggests the central methodology in many creative writing programs is public, group criticism. He makes classes sound more like the self-accusatory sessions of the communists and evangel prayer meetings, than anything I would tolerate.
Such group sessions might possibly work in the sort of summer sessions and graduate programs where each member has to first prove him or herself to be capable writer to be admitted. Such criteria are not possible in a state undergraduate program. Interviews with his classmates make it sound like Cho was exposed to the voices of the very unthinking, conventional students who were first suspected of persecuting Harris and Klebold.
One instructor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her classes because she thought he was "menacing" and wrote a letter for the record to the department chairman, Lucinda Roy, who in turn notified school authorities. Another instructor, Lisa Norris, asked the dean’s office about him and was told he had mental problems.
His male play writing teacher, Edward Falco, was less bothered and simply recognized Cho’s writing wasn’t "good" and that he probably took the courses to find a means of communicating.
Writing requires risk taking. A school that turns homework into an opportunity to enforce conformity by reporting deviance betrays the student. The fact Giovanni and Norris were correct in perceiving danger does not negate the ways their reactions and those of their students contributed to Cho’s growing sense of isolation. They, and everyone involved, should know the dangers of liberating the imagination in a creative writing program and either know how to respond or not offer the courses.
Notes:
My memories of comments at the time by Virginia Tech instructors and students confirmed with Wikipedia.
Cullen, Dave. Columbine, 2009.
Menand, Louis. "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?," New Yorker 8 June 2009.
Kass, Jeff. Columbine: A True Crime Story, 2009.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
How Long Can It Take?
When Michael Jackson died we were told it would take several weeks for lab results to tell us the cause of death. When my friend got the plague she was told it would be several weeks before they knew if any of the animals in her area were infected. When the body of a five-year-old girl was found in Monroe, Michigan, her family was told it would be several weeks before tests would tell them if she was the missing Nevaeh Buchanan.
Fortunately, I have limited experience with lab tests. Some had a day’s delay caused by the need to air express samples out of state. In the cases of Jackson, Buchanan, and my friend the tests were done by state laboratories that could be reached quickly by a car. With Jackson and Buchanan, the transporting cruisers would have been justified if they used sirens.
Tests I’ve had done to detect bacteria took time because the samples needed to sit in conditions that would accelerate the growth of the small organisms. It took a week before they could tell my friend only her dog had traces of the plague in his blood and that none of the wild animal’s they trapped had been infected. The source of the fleas is still unknown.
Buchanan required DNA testing; Jackson chemical tests. Neither have the time constraints that organic tests have.
When they finally identified Buchanan’s body, the state police said they placed her tests ahead of "others backlogged for months - hundreds of them homicides." It still took four days for a family whose child had been missing sixteen days.
Michigan, of course, has had budget problems for years, and probably long ago cut forensic staffs. One can only guess what’s going on in California as the state careens towards bankruptcy, and the Los Angeles police department has done little to improve its credibility since it arrested O. J. Simpson.
The promise of Sherlock Holmes that tests could provide positive evidence has disappeared in a cultural refusal to support science and a willingness to accept the consequences. In Buchanan’s case, three known sex offenders were arrested because they knew her mother, and two are still in protective custody waiting to be punished for knowing the woman. They may have committed no other crime, but in the anxious waiting period when nothing was known people needed assurance their children were safe and demanded the police show some sign of action.
If Detroit is frequently listed as the murder capital on the country, it isn’t simply the city that’s responsible, but all those taxpayers who are willing to let hundreds of cases languish in understaffed facilities where samples can be lost or deteriorate if it means they can have a few more dollars to spend on themselves. Too many people learn early there is no connection between actions and consequences.
No doubt some of the best lab technicians left for other jobs when the state work load became so large there was no hope of ever actually solving problems. Every year Michigan watches many of its college graduates leave the state because they know the remaining opportunities are not desirable. They still believe in a connection between behavior and reward, and realize they can only benefit from their years of education if they leave. Those who remain either burn out or never rise above mediocrity.
When a society separates actions from consequences, the very act of dissociation has predicable consequences. When those who deny science also deny the value of any social unit beyond the nuclear family, then the outlaw culture that develops is one that reinforces their expectations. It’s the rest of us, with expectations for improvement, who are punished.
Notes:
Hunt, Amber. "Nevaeh’s Case Becomes Top Priority for Crime Lab," Detroit Free Press, 9 June 2009.
Fortunately, I have limited experience with lab tests. Some had a day’s delay caused by the need to air express samples out of state. In the cases of Jackson, Buchanan, and my friend the tests were done by state laboratories that could be reached quickly by a car. With Jackson and Buchanan, the transporting cruisers would have been justified if they used sirens.
Tests I’ve had done to detect bacteria took time because the samples needed to sit in conditions that would accelerate the growth of the small organisms. It took a week before they could tell my friend only her dog had traces of the plague in his blood and that none of the wild animal’s they trapped had been infected. The source of the fleas is still unknown.
Buchanan required DNA testing; Jackson chemical tests. Neither have the time constraints that organic tests have.
When they finally identified Buchanan’s body, the state police said they placed her tests ahead of "others backlogged for months - hundreds of them homicides." It still took four days for a family whose child had been missing sixteen days.
Michigan, of course, has had budget problems for years, and probably long ago cut forensic staffs. One can only guess what’s going on in California as the state careens towards bankruptcy, and the Los Angeles police department has done little to improve its credibility since it arrested O. J. Simpson.
The promise of Sherlock Holmes that tests could provide positive evidence has disappeared in a cultural refusal to support science and a willingness to accept the consequences. In Buchanan’s case, three known sex offenders were arrested because they knew her mother, and two are still in protective custody waiting to be punished for knowing the woman. They may have committed no other crime, but in the anxious waiting period when nothing was known people needed assurance their children were safe and demanded the police show some sign of action.
If Detroit is frequently listed as the murder capital on the country, it isn’t simply the city that’s responsible, but all those taxpayers who are willing to let hundreds of cases languish in understaffed facilities where samples can be lost or deteriorate if it means they can have a few more dollars to spend on themselves. Too many people learn early there is no connection between actions and consequences.
No doubt some of the best lab technicians left for other jobs when the state work load became so large there was no hope of ever actually solving problems. Every year Michigan watches many of its college graduates leave the state because they know the remaining opportunities are not desirable. They still believe in a connection between behavior and reward, and realize they can only benefit from their years of education if they leave. Those who remain either burn out or never rise above mediocrity.
When a society separates actions from consequences, the very act of dissociation has predicable consequences. When those who deny science also deny the value of any social unit beyond the nuclear family, then the outlaw culture that develops is one that reinforces their expectations. It’s the rest of us, with expectations for improvement, who are punished.
Notes:
Hunt, Amber. "Nevaeh’s Case Becomes Top Priority for Crime Lab," Detroit Free Press, 9 June 2009.
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