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I understand when people say they don’t listen to the news anymore because it is too depressing. Just the first two weeks of June 2023 saw Nova Scotian smog invade New England, a nuclear plant in the Ukraine threatened by a lack of cooling water, the debt ceiling drama dissolved into more debt and more drama, and we acted as though Covid were over, even though its depression lingers in evidence too large to sanely ignore.
Covid could have been a remarkable alignment of people in a common purpose of protecting each other. It still could, but that possibility has thus far been overwhelmed by a third-rate debate about whether bleach works to stop it or whether “side effects” dare prevent prevention. It turned into mutual recrimination instead of mutual aid - or at least the way it was talked about by some of the loudest voices.
Unlike the Second World War or the early aftermath of 9/11 or other slightly heroic aspects of American life, instead of a great party of belonging, we entered a grand disaffiliation. Some people don’t even want their kids to marry a Republican (or a Democrat).
In a study of a 1972 flood in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, where 125 people died and many more were traumatized, historian Kai T. Erikson coined the term “the furniture of the self”. I think about that phrase a lot these days. If we couldn't find each other since Covid came, how could we possibly find the furniture of the self?
Enter Calamity’s ten best ideas for avoiding the constant headaches of low grade depression, while avoiding watching the news on “your" channel and never, under any circumstances, depression or not, “theirs.”
These ideas are offered in an aesthetic spirit. I don’t expect them to work. I don’t expect anything to work. I expect them to create belonging in very small communities or families. That is both all and everything.
These ideas are for prayers you have to say as a pastor after a school shooting, an environmental disaster, a flood, a tornado, lice and poison ivy outbreaks. They don’t pretend to cover the calamities of which we are yet unaware. They only apply to the known known.
They are mostly borrowed from scripture and Lucy Easthope, a well-known shamanic disaster expert in England, who immediately took her children out of school at the onset of Covid. As a doctor and a lawyer and a lead trainer at the British Emergency Planning College, aka disaster school, she knew the emergency rooms would fill up. Why take unnecessary risks when there are so many necessary ones already at your front door?
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The Top Ten
First, declare helplessness and at the outset. Don’t try to be useful. Forswear advice. Even if you think you know what everybody else should be doing, keep your munificence to yourself. Nobody trusts you either. Try this instead: “Do you mind if I sit around helplessly with you?”
Secondly, concentrate on the next crisis while making tea and tidying up and ignoring the experts, not the last one. Be prepared, not shocked. Be calm, not worried. The calmer you are, the more calm others will be. Vice versa is also true.
Third, find a trusted local leader and keep the cameras and national politicians away from that person. Let that person lead in the making of tea, the helpless stand-around, and the answering the phone calls. Make sure that leader knows the true meaning of non-anxious presence. If they don’t, relieve them of their duties and find a janitor from the school, a nurse at the hospital, a garbage man who has “seen worse” or an animal rescue van driver.
You ping your leaders like you ping crystal. If they are doing BS, don’t listen to them. Those of us who ignored the advice of the last President about Clorox Bleach are 77.3% less likely to have what we might call IBS.
Fourth, remember what research shows from the multiple bombings of England during the first and second world wars. People who were bombed were much calmer than people who were looking at the bombing on television. They developed a name for this syndrome that wasn’t onlooker syndrome but might have been. "Panic, Elite panic and secondary panic" are the terms. Translated: don’t worry with the worriers. They have plenty of help from each other to continue to worry. Tend the most tender ones. If you are far away, truly pray for them, while also taking the knee for yourself. Don’t just say you are going to pray: actually PRAY.
Fifth, don’t say anything that Jesus wouldn’t say (this works for all life-affirming religious and wisdom traditions too). Make all your statements as small as possible. “Fear not.” “The Birds of the Air.” (Leave them out of it if they are all dead.). Do something, like he would, to get Florida to ban your book. Eat with the sinners. For the sake of more love and life, take discerning risks with your own health.
Also remember this is NOT the time for self-care. You can do that later. The best care you can give yourself is to belong to the herd and help it herd itself. You’ll have time for delicious solitude later.
Sixth, in the event of something like a plane crash, like Easthope did, gather the belongings of the people after the crash and organize people to organize the Deretritus. “In an average plane cash there can be as many as 80,000 items still living.” The survivors are to be given EVERYTHING that can remind them of their lost beloveds. Easthope also gathered fingers and toes and limbs from soldiers who returned from Afghanistan and returned them to the families. Give the survivors EVERYTHING you can find. Engage another army in the work. This engagement accomplishes the belonging.
Women at the Grave was an organization that formed during Covid in NYC to help bury the dead who were refrigerated on their way to a grave. We didn’t find anything because these folk mostly never had anything in the first place. We did find some of their names and we did speak of them. Folk wisdom often says "you are only dead on the last day someone says your name." The word shines in the bleakness and the bleakness does not overcome it.
Seventh, count on women. They/we are used to being considered useless and having no press releases to issue, no case studies to write. We often act unattended and unseen, without a public relations team. Feed people and get others to do so too. In bombed-out England, the coffee shops gave away free food. They did so because they belonged to the task. Interestingly, the Tavistock Institute in London says groups have two purposes: one task, the other affiliation.
Eighth, be kind to the self-promoters but don't let them take over the show. Pray for the presidents as much as you pray for the people. They are trying to do a job that cannot be done from above but can be done from below. Send them a copy of Anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid Society. Help them learn how to get out of the way.
Ninth, do what Easthope does as an expert now. Realize you’ll never be invited to the important meetings or to give the big speeches. Your job will be to support the leaders you develop on the ground. The official power will be smart enough to know not to trust you.
Finally, read articles like this which have their tongues deep within their cheek and ask yourself why we don’t live like this all the time, deep in the power of belonging to each other.
Then join your wisdom and questions and helplessness with anyone committed to life-giving storytelling for the common good, and let’s figure out that belonging, together.
Donna Schaper teaches leadership at Hartford Seminary, writes as the Dolly Mama, is a chaplain for Silver Linings and works with Bricks and Mortals.