Category Archives: Blogosphere

Whenever disaster renews itself, as it inevitably does in the form of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc., I’m reminded of the many such events I had to “cover” in my 35 years as a print and electronic journalist and my recurrent discovery of the extraordinary degree to which ordinary people unselfishly pitched in to form a “community” to help each other.

It was a phenomenon that seldom got reported because it didn’t fit the formula my editors insisted be followed. They were, though they never admitted it, as Stephen Clark has written: “…merely courtiers to the political and cultural powers incumbent in society.”

Thus government and elite solutions were their narrative, though, generally, it wasn’t until government arrived that things really started to bog down, tempers frayed and so forth.

Bureaucrats, with their inflexible rules and authoritarian attitudes, backed by armed national guard and police with itchy trigger fingers stringing their yellow tape everywhere and keeping people from their damaged homes, just naturally promote frustration and isolation.

So I wasn’t surprised to see Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster —though I’m almost three years late in ordering it in Kindle form. It uses history lessons as varied as the 1909 San Francisco earthquake and the aftermath of 9-11 to persuasively debunk the usual elitist attitude that disaster brings human chaos, looting, murder, and so on: the cliche stuff you always see in movies and in most dystopian novels.

Stuff I can’t watch or read without wincing, because I know it’s mostly a pile of lies, as Solnit testifies:

“Part of the stereotypical image is that we’re either wolves or we’re sheep. We’re either devouring babies raw and tearing up grandmothers with our bare hands, or we’re helpless and we panic and mill around like idiots in need of Charlton Heston men in uniforms with badges to lead us. I think we’re neither, and the evidence bears that out.”

It certainly does.  Solnit is a self-proclaimed “progressive activist” but she’s one whose condemnation of Communist oppression shocks the Marxist left and she tells a valuable story of a kind of utopian community spontaneously arising in times of collapse.

Via Instapundit.