Rising from the Ashes

10 keys for America to adapt to the Disaster Age

Image: Weems Works

We live in a time of shared calamity. That includes a pandemic AND climate disruption. Any false sense of security felt by those of us lucky enough to be born into wealth is shattering. We will lose many more lives, homes, lifestyles, and businesses. This predicament is both tragic and instructional. How great our society will be depends on how we respond individually and collectively. Pretending or wishing for easier times won’t cut it. The stakes are too high to keep making private and political decisions that result in huge death tolls, isolation, and economic devastation. Our duty is to adapt and overcome.

Areas in which to adapt:

1. Developing emotional intelligence. We don’t naturally know how to deal constructively with fear, loneliness, anger, and grief. Without skills in this, it’s understandable that we might frequently lash out physically or on social media. Or we might turn inward and try to cover our pain with chemicals, be they natural, swallowed, or injected.
2. Cooperating for shared benefit. 105,000 American COVID-19 deaths and counting are evidence of our mortality and interconnectedness. Rebuilding community and economic health requires teamwork. Simple steps like wearing masks reduce virus transmission and demonstrate our interdependence. More complex is coordination between nations, states, and municipalities. When we work together to triage, obtain treatments, and surge resources to those most at risk, we can stop feedback loops and reduce crisis impacts.
3. Operating businesses creatively. We need to be able to work to provide for our families and have a society that can support those who can’t work. That includes children, the sick, and the elderly. Modern businesses must provide goods and services while controlling risks for consumers and workers. Scared consumers buy less, and sick or dead workers are less productive. This isn’t just a matter of “sucking it up.” It demands creative solutions, including to block virus spread and reduce pollution.
4. Making distinctions. We failed to respond to the pandemic as well as a number of other countries. One reason is not being able to distinguish between real and fake threats, quality and poor evidence, useful and faulty issue framing, and competent and corrupt officials.
5. Institutionalizing mutual support. Democracies depend on an informed and productive citizenry. That takes access to quality public education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Privatization in these areas creates cracks by design. Social unrest arises from desperation with poor living conditions. It’s insane to expect the market to produce better ones on its own. It hasn’t, and it won’t miraculously start now.

Habits to overcome (and call out in ourselves and each other):

1. Pretending. Wishful thinking leaves us vulnerable to real-world impacts. Denying the seriousness of a virus or climate change has already resulted in tragedy. Nor can we pretend that lockdowns are more than a stop-gap, that science can fix everything, or that feigned certainty and bravado are indicators of leadership.
2. Selfish thinking. Quality reasoning is impossible until we give up trying to be right and become true team players. By stroking our egos in pursuit of partisan points, we merely reinforce political gridlock. Modern politics and punditry are rife with faulty logic and framing. False binary choices (e.g., freedom or socialism) abound. So do personal attacks on messengers, data cherry-picking, and other signs of confirmation bias. Overestimating the importance of our individual feelings hurts the team.
3. Zero-sum mindsets. Believing that some must lose for others to win is a hallmark of isolationism, tribalism, and nationalism. It excuses denying others access to basic human rights. “I’ve got mine, Jack” is a horrifying governing principle. It fails miserably in producing quality relationships and resilient economies, including through equitable trade agreements.
4. Cynicism and resignation. These destroy governmental accountability. The more people check out of the process, the more corruption takes root. The resulting incompetence is self-perpetuating: instead of demanding better leadership or management, we accept patchwork responses to crises and persistent resource and risk disparities between dwindling haves and swelling have-nots.
5. Focusing on short-term profit. Greed is perhaps our greatest foe. It produces unsafe working conditions in meat-processing plants and unregulated pollution. It also leads to procrastination on using prevention and early mitigation to greatly reduce overall costs of crises. That includes building to withstand flooding and stockpiling PPE in case of a pandemic.

Adapting and overcoming in these ways is a true test of our mental, emotional, and political fitness. All are suspect. Consider the quality of debate on social media or in the Senate for issues like healthcare access. How many interactions are actually about finding practical solutions?

Getting there from here requires national transformation. That starts with taking personal AND societal responsibility. Books, courses, and conversations about effective ways of being can help. Regular people developing them can model and highlight those ways for others. Authors Ben Zander and Rosamund Stone call this “leading from any chair.” We can also vote for competent leaders and add to the movement to reduce the role of corporate money in politics. Taking society-level responsibility also includes teaching mental, emotional, and business skills in public schools. There are no silver bullets. Our approach must be comprehensive.

We are losing lives, homes, and businesses for a reason. Not enough Americans are learning from failures and replacing mental and political approaches that perpetuate them. A big reason for that is popular denial of reality. One binary I’ll resort to: we can resist our dystopian reality or find ways to embrace its messiness. Tolkien wrote in Lord of the Rings

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Pandemics and extreme weather events ignore national borders and egos. That truth warrants finding new ways to engage personally, economically, and politically. And while change can seem hard, so does losing like we are right now. Heroes rise in times like these. Will we?