One Small Voice: Will we survive a couple of storms?

by Lynn Mandaville

Two storms struck the United States this past week.

The second storm to strike chronologically was a sinister force of nature, a hurricane named Laura, the twelfth such named storm of the summer.

Laura is no longer even a blip on a weather radar map, but she was a category 4 storm which made landfall in Louisiana on Thursday, Aug. 27.  She had sustained winds of 150 mph, her anticipated storm surge had been described as “unsurvivable,” and she wreaked such havoc on the residents along the Louisiana coast that the physical clean-up and rebuilding will take years.

It’s not like we don’t know about hurricanes.  They’ve been happening to us data-happy Americans for long enough that we’ve created a separate season named after them.

We’ve expended all kinds of money, science and technology to understand them, to track them, and to create models of how they behave.  Meteorologists pride themselves on their ability to predict the paths and the kind of destruction we can expect of them.

Because of all that we’ve learned about hurricanes, we’re able to order advance evacuations of threatened coastlines when it’s warranted.  We’re able to buy plywood by the forests-full with which to board up buildings, and we’re able to fill sandbags by the dune-full with which to hold back the flood waters.

Engineers and entrepreneurs have invented and marketed to homeowners in storm-prone areas heavy duty storm shutters and tie-downs to protect their domiciles.

And humanity has developed such an arrogance toward Mother Nature that people are still allowed to rebuild in and on those same threatened places that have been ravaged numerous times over.

(Such folly is the financial price we pay for outsmarting acts of God.)

The first storm that struck us last week didn’t have a name.

It struck on Sunday, Aug. 24, in Kenosha, Wisc., in the form of horrendous violence committed against an unarmed black man by a white Kenosha police officer.

It didn’t require tremendous human force, just the overzealousness of a cop whose gun delivered seven bullets at point blank range into the back of another human being.

It struck, however, with a ferocity that rivaled that of Laura, not just by virtue of the paralysis it caused its victim, but in the mental pain and suffering to a nation already on the edge because of a pandemic.

We don’t know a lot about the nature of these human-caused storms, in spite of their increasing frequency.

They don’t have a designated season – at least not yet.  And we don’t routinely name them – although it seems we are getting to know each one by the name of its black victim.

As a nation, we don’t spend millions upon millions of dollars studying these storms.  We don’t track them, or predict their severity based on scientific models.  We don’t try to develop ways to protect ourselves from them.  And we don’t have a FEMA-equivalency to handle a crisis after a storm has wreaked its vengeance on a community.

Social scientists have postulated some valid ideas as to the myriad causes for these storms.  Possible predictors have been identified: poverty, joblessness, poor education, poor health care, skin color, and the institutionalized inequality caused by unchecked racism.

It seems, however, that, as a nation, we have no concerted or sustained interest in studying the root causes of these storms, or of committing the money, time, or energy required to fend off these storms or mitigate their damage the way we do with hurricanes.

We don’t care too much about collecting data about them.

The havoc that is wrought by these storms is so much greater than whatever collateral damage might occur from rioting, arson or looting.

It involves more than just a clean-up and rebuild.

It is measured by the immeasurable psychological harm done not only to the victim and his family and friends, but to the victimizer, and to the victimizer’s colleagues who now become guilty by association.

It is measured by the unquantifiable mental harm done to an entire community who loses its trust in a traditionally trustworthy institution like law enforcement.

It is marked by the inevitable, evolving guilt among another community that had no idea that its ordinary, day-in and day-out behavior was preventing a nation’s emergence from the evils of its history of slavery and intolerance.

(Such folly is the penny wisdom and dollar foolishness of not outsmarting acts of Man.)

Two storms struck the United States this past week.

They struck only days apart.

Two entirely different kinds of storms.

Two similar outcomes.