Personal Politics and Emergency – Feminist Book Club

It’s hurricane season right now in the southeastern United States, or as I like to say, it’s the season when personal politics and emergency situations intersect in the most confusing ways. You may have heard about my dabbling in emergency management in a few places on this site (it was my own personal Harriet Jones intro moment), and I recently found myself doing some response work in a rural county. This county leans heavily toward Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republican type politicians, and everywhere I went I saw flags supporting, cheering, and encouraging the former felon who is running for president again this election cycle. It’s a place I wouldn’t normally go, but it was packed.

Introduction to Emergency Management

Emergency Management (EM) can mean many things to different people. Therefore, I want to be clear about how I use it in this context – it is a management function (performed by a local, state, national, or tribal government) responsible for creating a framework and culture (This is very controversial in some circles) Communities can reduce vulnerability to threats and/or hazards and respond to disasters. When you think about creating a framework, you have to consider the context in which disasters exist; so, at its most basic, there are four phases of EM.

Prepare

It’s exactly what it sounds like. In the time between disasters, state, local, tribal and national governments release information to people and conduct drills similar to those you did in grade school for a tornado or earthquake. In this phase, emergency managers try to prepare people for things that can’t be avoided or prevented.

reply

Disaster strikes! It could be the collapse of the Surfside Apartments in Miami, Florida, the 2023 Maui wildfires that severely impacted Lahaina, Hawaii, or the COVID-19 pandemic that is sweeping the globe. A disaster doesn’t have to be “natural” to warrant a response (and there is!! There is no such thing as a natural disaster, but we’ll save that for another day). A defining characteristic of the response phase is that businesses and people are unable to operate normally, and their safety and well-being are threatened. This is the phase where you’ll typically see a large-scale response from local, state, and federal entities, including moving employees (like me!), resources (like line workers!), or supplies (like food!) to the affected area.

recover

Once the urgency of a disaster begins to fade, we move into the recovery phase. This is the part that takes the longest and will vary greatly depending on whether you live in a wealthy city (with lots of resources and funding to help you and the local economy recover) or if you live in a rural area or historically marginalized area. Recovery includes rebuilding homes destroyed by wildfires, reconstructing roads damaged by flooding, or coordinating efforts across states to help affected farmers replace livestock lost in hurricanes. Often, multiple agencies at all levels of government are involved in the recovery phase. It is a long process and is often the part people dislike the most.

Mitigation

Honestly, this is my favorite phase of EM. In this phase, we evaluate what happened during the disaster and think about how to prevent similar levels of impact in the future. A good example is elevating your home, or creating fire breaks between your home and your neighbors, or planting mangroves and other vegetation along the coast. Not all disaster impacts can be mitigated, so when we identify those areas, we get back to preparing.

Why is this important?

Oh, good question! I provide this background so that you understand that personal politics can impact any and all phases of EM and can have measurable consequences for individuals in some very direct ways, in places you wouldn’t expect, but it’s there, happening behind the scenes. When I was doing response work in the aforementioned rural counties, I found proud and hard-working people who loved where they lived and the lives they had built for themselves. However, a common sentiment I saw and heard was that neither the local, state, or federal government were providing enough help when they needed it. “I don’t understand why this is so hard!” they would say, with indignation on their faces. I could only think of how they elected local, state, and federal government politicians who denied that climate change was real, believed in fiscal conservatism that hobbled response agencies at all levels, and didn’t really trust any level or type of government. I just felt like I was repeating the same feeling of “well, this isn’t my own fault” over and over again in real life.

Some other things I saw

Interestingly, while they paradoxically eschew the idea that local/state/federal governments should help, they also haven’t built a culture or community that utilizes and fosters mutual aid networks…at least in name only. They’ll argue that they can be self-reliant and recover and rebuild on their own. They don’t need a “woke or snowflake” mutual aid network! They can get by just fine on their own.

…but if they heard that Ms. Johnson’s path was blocked by a tree, they made sure to clear her way out. Or if they ran into Tim at Home Depot and they knew he was having a bad season on the water this year, so they picked up some tarps for him and then just happened to “forget” them at his house. It’s crazy to see these people I’m very close to offer their trucks to get me through muddy and flooded roads because my sedan was too low to the ground, yet curse my job, tell me that I’m personally responsible for their fate and their inability to recover, and claim that this country is in a mess after the last election was stolen.

I have been confused by my friends many times.

Conclusion

As we get deeper into this election cycle, I feel like what I really want to share is that even though people may have very different views than you do and hold beliefs that you loathe — sometimes they can surprise you. If we don’t engage with people in a way that shows them that we have more in common than we do differences — then what on earth are we doing as members of a feminist book club? As people who profess an interest in looking at life from the perspective of all intersecting identities and finding a path forward that helps lift us all up? I keep repeating Fannie Lou Hamer and Audre Lorde’s calls for solidarity and the idea that no one is free unless everyone is free… maybe that’s what they wanted to work on? Regardless, personal politics impact the emergencies you face and how you recover from them. So think about this as you head to the polls, okay?

Natalia Santana is a compliance professional by day and an activist, student, and parent by night. She is interested in the intersection of activism and education, and her joy in life is distilling complex concepts into digestible Twitter rants. Favorite genres: Science fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction books.