Irene and Emergency Preparedness: From FEMA to Grover

On the weekend Hurricane Irene hit New York, my partner and I were visiting western Massachusetts. We weathered the storm in an early 20th century school house that is home to a small Buddhist community in Conway, about twenty miles northwest of Northampton, MA. While we were very concerned about our friends in the city, we also were heartened by the numerous postings and emails we received from those who had decided to bring a festive air to the doom and gloom of the media's weather coverage. It seemed that folks were not only buying gallons of water, but also stocking up on wine, gin and cookies.

Its no surprise that many of our queer friends decided to take the hurricane as an opportunity for some bacchanalian shenanigans. Thanks to the Christian Right and Michelle Bachmann, we know that AIDS, earthquakes and hurricanes are simply God's punishment for gay sex and lesbian parenting. Of course the gays are celebrating! Why pay attention to the hard science of climate change when we have homosexuality and Revelations?

On a serious serious note, although the subway shutdown put a damper on cross-borough partying, this impulse to collectivize seems to subtly index folks' resistance to the talk of "go bags," "emergency kits" and "evacuation zones." Irene hit just a week or so shy of September's National Preparedness Month. Today you can still find ads across Manhattan for FEMA's Readiness campaign, which are not so subtly juxtaposed to memorials for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. On FEMA's www.ready.gov you can find a slew of information about tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, nuclear and chemical threats - and of course how you can make your own emergency kit from home. Rather than focus on neighborly solidarity, the federal discourse of "emergency preparedness" emphasizes an individualist, market-driven response -- how you can take care of your self and your family. And in "family," they mean the nuclear family model, which harkens back to the nostalgic Cold War heyday of fallout shelters and air-raid drills.

Nowhere on this site can you find information for those of us who may not have the physical or financial means necessary to create such a kit. And nowhere does FEMA articulate any "special" suggestions for gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals who are often more vulnerable to being denied basic human rights such as healthcare, shelter and family re-unification during emergency situations. This is also true for the New York City Office of Emergency Management's website and media campaign, which while doing much to help raise consumer awareness as to those necessary "Go bag" items, could have done a bit more for its less fortunate residents, such as the inmates of Rikers Island and those required to evacuate who were home bound or without access to a car.

As adults were told to be responsible and take care of their bodies, minds and property, so too did kids have to learn how to be ready for a catastrophe. The most illuminating aspect of the Ready.gov website is the section entitled Ready Kids!, in particular the fifteen minute Sesame Street episode called "Let's Get Ready!" As we are guided by Grover through the process of "getting ready," the consumer rationale for emergency preparedness becomes evident. Grover visits a bi-racial family in the suburbs to see how they are getting prepared - the nuclear family of today! They're busy putting together their "go-bag":

Realizing they don't have everything they need, mom and daughter visit the drugstore to stock up on some essentials:

Our heroine is incredibly cute, but unfortunately she is being schooled in good consumerism! We all know from our own last-minute hurricane shopping experiences how much money was spent on food, water and batteries before Irene made land-fall. The jury may still be out on the greater effects the hurricane had on the retail industry that weekend - while Home Depot and Walgreens saw a surge in sales, Macys was sadly down in "back-to-school week" profits. The fluctuating market, however, can't hold a candle to the extreme devastation that befell areas of the Catskills, Vermont, and our favorite town in Western Mass, Shelburne Falls - which should remind us of the fragility of these more peripheral communities and ecosystems.

There may be hope for those of us who are skeptical of the current consumer-focused rationale for fighting forest fires, hurricane-force winds and climate change. In a subversive take on emergency preparedness by the muppets of Sesame Street, Grover gives us an alternative vision. In Grover's very large go-bag, which he can barely carry, are a feather boa, googley-eyes, and a bowling ball.

While Grover's Chicana muppet friend Rosita reminds him that these items will not help him survive a hurricane, Grover remains focused on his hopes for impending disaster. Grover asks, "So where is this emergency?" Rosita replies, "There is no emergency, Grover." He responds, "Not even a little one?"

At first struck by melancholic despair, Grover makes due and quickly suggests, "Well in that case, let's go bowling!" Excitedly wielding his bowling ball, Grover accidentally drops it on a cat who meows in pain. The scene closes with him running to her, exclaiming, "Don't worry kitty, I have my emergency kit!"

I leave it to you to find the irony of Grover's somewhat flamboyant take on emergency preparedness. This may all be to say that we must re-evaluate our allegiance to kitties, muppets, inmates, and elders that cohabit with us on this planet. For, as queer eco-critic Catriona Sandilands suggests, queer and ecological politics are intimately entangled, and therefore require us to more deeply analyze the varied structures of power and capital that shape these allied struggles.

Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and Stillness

On Tuesday I was sitting on the couch editing my chapter on Atwood's Surfacing and felt a slight rumble. Here in Conway, Massachusetts you might believe this to be a unique occurrence, but energy has an odd way of working around here - some folks are just used to quakes, whether they manifest as spiritual, emotional or physical jolts. I was interested by the academics who posted on Facebook that they believed the quake was simply a manifestation of the momentum or angst that end of summer writing can produce. At our solitary work stations, sometimes we can forget the movement and flexibility required to study and write. My struggle, and maybe some of yours, is to find the middle ground between movement and stillness, peripatetic anxiety and boring stasis. The energetic bumps in the night are just reminders of this need for balance.

As academia becomes more market-driven, and we frantically scramble to prove our expertise in the form of conference papers, articles, books, blog posts, etc., it might be useful to consider the Classical foundations of scholarly life. The work of the mind for centuries, if not millennium, has often been paired with physical activity and spiritual contemplation. Greek philosophers often comment on Socrates walking in contemplation, or standing for days at a time, without moving, in the face of a literal military siege. Montaigne confesses that he has a quick and steady walk, but he "knows not which of the two, my mind or my body, I have had more difficulty in keeping in one place." The balance between cognitive and physical movement and our capacity for stillness appears to be an enduring challenge. This week, as I struggled to stay sitting and finish a chapter draft, I found there was nothing better than taking a long walk in the middle of the day to shore up my creative energy and revive my focus for further contemplation.

And so we might consider the impending hurricane as a test of this balance between stillness and movement. I'm happily holed up in Massachusetts and will be waiting out the storm at a retreat center Tsegyalgar East with Jess. We are both thinking of our friends and family in New York, however, who will have to endure a lack of mobility this weekend, and face the frightening absence of public transportation. Perhaps we can think of this storm as Mother Nature's way of reminding us to practice being still. She asks us to take a break from our harried daily routine, sit without our laptops, our cell phones, and our grab-bag of worries, and to be present to the constant wanderings of our inner selves that we often ignore or take for granted. Be restful friends, and remember, the subway will be closed only for a little while.