A Maui Press Conference
What’s happening in Maui this week puts sharp attention on the social fabric of community; of our lives. When an entire community burns up, everything is disrupted — and that’s what’s happened in Lahaina, Hawaii.
Many people did not survive. Around a thousand may or may not be missing… it’s hard to tell as communication systems, the internet, and power are out in areas where people may be staying.
A press conference on Friday put the reality in stark terms. The mayor just declares, “It’s all gone” (at 42:11 in the video below). He’s referring to the majority of the city of Lahaina, and goes on to specify the perimeters of the destroyed areas.
It’s a heck of a press conference. The Public Information Officer (PIO) running the whole operation shows us how it’s done in terms of managing expectations, not getting sidetracked, and keeping very clear communication between all parties. The press conference itself was a perfect line-up of federalism: from a US Senator to the governor to the mayor and including the FEMA Regional Administrator who is a presidential political appointee. Police and fire chiefs were available as well as other experts and legislators.
That’s what it should look like. All the major players were there who are needed to get things moving, answer questions, address bureaucratic logjams, and make sure the most critical, high-priority items were and are getting attention. Clearly state and federal machines are activated to support this ongoing response and coming recovery. It will be needed; especially because of the highly unique logistics of a community in the sea. This post here has more on the overall response.
The community is hurting and destroyed, and the frustration was reflected in the tough questions from some in the media at the press conference. Reporting since the press conference is increasingly focused on what might have gone wrong or been missing with alerting the public — but putting all of those pieces together is going to take some time and there are still life/safety issues going on. It’s tricky to stay focused on the high-priority items in the middle of a crisis when people want answers about why things didn’t go differently. It’s a careful balance of trust and honesty for the people you serve while taking care to stay on target… and while also respecting that deeper issues and problems will need to be addressed at some point.
It’s especially tricky because when the social fabric is torn apart and burned up in a disaster like this. The leadership that’s in place when it happens will both come under fire and also simultaneously have to handle the unfolding crisis — and both are happening still today. In Friday’s press conferene, the PIO kept perspective in asking for kindness in the questions; indicating that several people in the press conference had not slept for 48 hours, and that they had been dealing with some very tough realities. Our humanity matters, and it’s worth keeping it front and center.
What happens during these critical moments will help determine how the social fabric holds together through this crisis… and how it’s re-woven as the next days and weeks unfold. Will the community still trust its leadership? How much of the community will even remain?
Nothing will ever be the same. Lots of people are just gone. Lots of neighborhoods are just gone. The business area is just gone. The economic engine is gone. The Lahaina area tax base is mostly gone.
Thousands of people will be and already are affected by the losses of the already-known fatalities; let alone the still-missing. Local residents, first responders, and assisting personnel will be forever touched by traumas they’ve already dealt with and those still to unfold. There’s damage, there are missing pieces, there are missing humans, and there will be deep gashes and scars that never quite go away.
The local police chief in the video above notes that “My cops answer calls for service… we don’t normally… go into buildings and pull out… bodies” (minute 47:30). He adds that “We’ve got to make sure that we respect everything and that we bring everybody to the resting place the right way.” On the fatality numbers (on Friday), he said, “It’s 53. It is rising. I do not know what the final number is going to be. And it’s going to be horrible and tragic when we get that number, because everyone of us — It’s not ‘53’. It’s 53 families, friends — it’s a community. The amount of loss is incredible, and it’s going to be devastating.”
“If We Don’t Do That, We’re Going To Lose The Community”
Local Maui resident and business owner Alan Dickar talks extensively about damage to the Lahaina area community in the video below, with lots of fired-up talk about things that will need attention to get the community’s recovery moving in the right direction.
It’s worth listening to his many points, because he brings up a lot of details that need to be considered as part of the larger response and recovery (and society, really) but don’t often get covered by the media. Civilization is complicated, but we often try to blow past that. In fact, this anchor was very much winding up the interview, but Mr. Dickar pushed through to make points about so many interconnected factors that are part of what create community. People in crisis experiencing spectacular loss are extra motivated to be heard and so he just plowed right through. At 11:10 in the video he says,
“There’s a magic, and my biggest fear is that people don’t understand that this isn’t the situation when you just start building again. There’s a fabric of this community that’s special. And I gotta tell you… the fabric is burned, but it’s still there. Even people — a lot of people have nothing left — but most people are determined to stay… We’ve got to figure out a way so to make it so that that the people now who have no place to live can at least stay someplace for six months while we start rebuilding — and if we don’t do that, we’re going to lose the community.”
“If we don’t do that, we’re going to lose the community.”
One might have thought that would be the headline, but that’s not the kind of thing that news folks are looking for. They don’t do social fabric and deep, systemic concerns that involve our flourishing and thriving — or lack thereof.
Usually they don’t, but every once in a while you see a tiny bit of it… and on Friday there was another great interview about society and community that made the deep-conversations-in-the-media cut.
“People Have Really Lost The Ability To Connect With One Another”
This interview is about rural poverty, but also about our torn-up, knotted, threadbare American social fabric. The interview highlights specific regions, but the issues are widespread across the rural US:
“What we see… is the the social infrastructure — these are places where people can build social bonds — have really atrophied; they’ve fallen apart. The bowling alley — it’s not that people aren’t bowling — it’s that there is no bowling alley. And so on. And so as the beauty shops and barber shops have closed down people have really lost the ability to connect with one another and in fact in the book, we tie that very closely to the rise of to deaths due to opioid overdose.”
People spend a lot of time talking about how we’ve come to have an authoritarian movement in the US, and a push to the far right.
I think it has a lot to do with our active, purposeful neglect of and refusal to invest in our own rural communities for five decades — and that refusal is not an accident.
It’s been a deliberate Republican strategy since the 1970s; it’s a way to push back on the demands and laws from the 1960s about equality, equity, and civil rights by refusing to invest in American communities. In fact, they’ve taken it further and demonized government investment in anything except big business and wealthy people. It evolved into “trickle-down economics” in the 1980s, and a persistent shrinking of government and government services in many ways and at many levels since.
Republican advisor Lee Atwater was recorded in 1981 saying,“So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.” The longer, more horrific quote is on Atwater’s Wikipedia page. Heather McGhee’s book “Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” has a deeper exploration of all this.
We’ve got a growing flock of far-right demagogues fanning the flames of the toxic, angry mixture of racism and resentment… but the resentment is about rural atrophy that Republicans created.
The secret sauce is that they’ve built up a culture war and far-right media empire for four decades that has blamed the people’s frustrations on everybody but Republicans. It’s the liberal elites, or the coastal elites, or the academics, or government employees, or feminists, or “globalists” (anti-Semitic code language), or anyone who isn’t white, or now the “woke mob.”
It’s scapegoating on a massive scale, and we barely ever even talk about it or acknowledge it. It’s such deep social mess stuff.
Yet behind it all America is refusing to invest in Americans.
And now we’re in all kinds of crisis. Now we’ve got an authoritarian threat and a full-fledged culture war, in a time of ever-increasing disasters in which we need government to be effective. But Republicans have been weakening and under-funding it for decades.
The news media are out complaining about all of what went wrong (possibly) with the unexpected disaster in Maui, but behind it all — people don’t want to properly fund emergency management, fire, public safety, and infrastructure in ways that could help society thrive and flourish while also being resilient in the face of the unexpected; better able to “bounce back” faster. Building that kind of a society takes some effort and in most places we’re not doing it.
Determining Our Future
Did this post get sidetracked?
No. Because what’s happening in Maui has everything to do with decisions that communities and government agencies have made up to this point — at every level.
As a collective, we’ve known for decades that we need to better integrate disaster intelligence components including situational awareness (like what’s happening with a fire), resource management (like sending fire engines and helicopters to respond), incident potential (like what is this fire going to do?), and public information (such as alerts, warnings, sirens, notifications, news, or evacuations).
We haven’t done it to the extent that’s needed — even though the technical capability is there. That shows in what happened in Maui with a super fast-moving, wind-driven wildfire. This integration hasn’t happened partly because it’s super complicated across lots of systems, technology, and processes. It’s partly because we’re not great at long-term problem solving for wicked problems. But it’s also partly because we underfund government at every level which makes it hard to solve problems, to think critically, and to strategically integrate systems and processes.
That matters in a crisis like in Maui, and it matters in every community in the US when we don’t invest in the things communities need to thrive, flourish, and prosper — including in the face of the unexpected.
Hawaii Representative Jill Tokuda said it this way just this morning:
“This is a national crisis. This is a national problem…. This is rural America. Rural America is getting hit by these types of climate change chaoses every single day’s disaster [sic]. Rural America — which is what Hawaii is — faces the crisis of being able to get those first responders and support as fast as they need to to be able to respond in these situations… Quite frankly, this is going to be happening across the country and they need the money to be able to respond to wherever disaster strikes.”
Maui may have a chance to rebuild with intention and purpose; to find temporary housing to keep the community somewhat intact as the large pieces are put in place to rebuild… and then to rebuild and recover with intention and purpose to put the pieces in place for resilience, sustainability, and prosperity.
Several communities that have been wiped out have made those conscious, intentional decisions — from Greensberg, Kansas to Joplin, Missouri to Louisiana and elsewhere. The coming months will help determine what happens. The local power structure and the decision-making in the coming weeks will help determine what happens. What of the remaining Lahaina area social fabric will be able to pull together and chart a path forward for the community? As the wise one says, “We’ll see.”
What The Rest Of Us Can Do
The rest of us have a slightly longer moment to figure out how we can actively change the direction of the rest of the country so we can head down a different path than the far-right authoritarian one we’re on right now; as pushed by the Republican party.
What will we do with this moment we have, between now and the 2024 election?
I think we can change the national zeitgeist and the corresponding direction we’re headed in by raising holy heck, and that’s the purpose of our nonprofit’s work here.
We can energize and reach a coalition of the majority of voters with action and civic engagement that gets people talking and inspired to actively make change.
We do it with connection, community, doing more with coalitions at every level, partnering with or pressuring businesses, fighting using moral courage and values, and raising a ruckus and driving the narrative at every level — our 5 Things. It’s big-picture work that helps us make change at scale but which also helps us re-weave and strengthen the social fabric while we’re doing it.
Join us. Subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t. Share our stuff with your people, groups, mailing lists, and networks. Invite us to speak at your meetings, like ASAP. Sign up to volunteer. Send us funding. You get the idea.
We’ve got time to rise up and change our collective trajectory. Let’s do it.