Dunkirk in Texas

As the effects of Hurricane Harvey continue to unfold in Texas,  and as attention focuses on saving lives, we are also thinking about what it means for the future.

The unnecessary vulnerabilities in Houston, almost always as a result of greed, are again exposed, and as usual the costs are paid more often in the suffering of the most vulnerable people.

While first responders do their jobs with distinction, the failure of government--including the federal government--to engage in preventive measures in a time when such storms and related events are more frequent and ferocious, due especially to the climate crisis, is not a good sign for the future.

We have yet to face the enormity of the tasks, when huge catastrophes hit huge population centers with complex infrastructure. It's bad enough when it occurs in one place. But what happens when--and not if, but when--such catastrophic events occur in more than one place at one time?  This is the cost of denying reality.

But while this event is happening, this is a human story, and an article in the New Yorker ask those human questions that will recur in future disasters, and I'm sure already echo somewhere inside most of us:

"But if we now know more about how the climate will behave, we know less about how humans will react. The experience of frequent storms is one of incredible stress...There is now, too, a double anxiety that greets storms like this. There is the fear about the damage done by wind and rain. And then there is a fear, made stark by the memory of Katrina, about how we will treat each other."

The first news I saw out of Texas, which this piece references in the very next sentence, named one such fear: a homeowner, as the storm began. who saw someone he believed was trying to enter his house, and shot him in the head.

We fear this now especially because we are told we are a severely divided nation, and the politically opposed are often violent in their rhetoric, and vivid in their disdain and especially their suspicions.  That we have a chief executive who is actively inflaming disdain and suspicion, and setting race against race for political gain, only adds to these fears.

The other element of this story is the gun.  The valorization of guns, the encouragement to use a gun as a first resort, can turn a misunderstanding into a mortal wound or death.  Who would want to hold out a hand to a hand holding a gun?

But since Harvey made landfall, the New Yorker has published two new articles, one from a Houston neighborhood which tells how people on a single street--many who have never met--are selflessly helping each other, and the other which focuses on the efforts of  individuals using small boats to rescue those about to be inundated by rapidly rising floodwaters.  Learning of people needing rescue from social media, they coordinate the ferrying of people away from their own rooftops, as well as the forgotten (often elderly and handicapped) in group housing.

This citizen navy is conducting a computerized Dunkirk.  Notably, many of those involved are from Louisiana, who remember the help they got from people in Houston during Katrina and the more recent flooding in New Orleans.

This reciprocity makes literal the ethical rule that I regard as the most basic: "You'd do the same for me."  That's the essential faith of a civilized society, and as long as it prevails, there is hope for the future.