If FEMA Goes Away, Could Communities Step Up?

I was always somewhat astonished by the mainstream popularity of The Walking Dead. Up until 2010, zombie movies and books were more of a cult phenomenon: beloved by hard-core horror fans but too gory for most, its social commentary obscured under gallons of fake blood and realistic prosthetics.

As a TV show, maybe The Walking Dead made zombies more accessible to a wider audience. Or maybe, we were primed for considering what post-apocalyptic life might be like: the bands of survivors that would form, their battles over scarce resources, the prices they would pay throughout. Viewers would identify with any of the ensemble cast, debate what they might do differently given a similar situation.

The Walking Dead could get shockingly bleak, played for ratings of course, a counterpoint to whatever drama we were encountering in our own lives. No one at work was trying to melt our face with an iron, bash in our loved ones' skulls with a nail-studded baseball bat, or of course, tear into our guts. Literally, anyway.

Possibly the more important takeaway over the course of the show's 11 seasons was the way the different bands of survivors rebuilt society. The various colonies that emerged often reflected their leaders' dysfunction, either because that was who they had always been, or because the trauma of the zombie apocalypse broke them.

Surprise: disasters themselves may not be traumatizing

"The risk for PTSD is far higher, unsurprisingly, for those who are already damaged, fragile, inflexible," wrote author Rebecca Solnit in her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, "which is to say that events themselves, however horrific, have no guaranteed psychic outcome; the preexisting state matters."

For the most part, she posited, people shine in the aftermath of catastrophic earthquakes, hurricanes, and even terrorist attacks: "The idea that disasters cause widespread PTSD is not proven, is highly disputed," she wrote. "It is also highly disputed that disaster victims need any sort of professional help to get better rather than social support to get better.”

Solnit presented example after example of people coming together, in the first hours and days following some crisis, to form communal kitchens and shelters and supply chains before more organized volunteer and government response could begin.

"In the first few days," she wrote of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, "people took care of each other, and the methods and networks they developed continued to matter even after the Red Cross and other relief organizations moved in."

Although FEMA and its state level counterparts discourage community members from "self deploying" – instead, people are encouraged to sign up to volunteer through approved organizations before a disaster – government response can and does fail outright:

• In San Francisco, "the misguided policy of trying to blast firebreaks ahead of the flames and preventing citizens from firefighting in their own homes and neighborhoods."
• In New York following 9/11, the sheer scale of the destruction and the loss of so many command-level emergency responders left survivors scrambling.
• In New Orleans, of course, the thousands of survivors stranded at the Superdome and Convention Center without adequate food or water.

And, perhaps worst of all in San Juan, Argentina, following its 1944 earthquake:

"The [Juan Peron-led] top-down disaster relief produced alienation and despair: bodies were incinerated in great heaps without being identified; children were evacuated without careful records being kept so that many of them too were lost to those who loved them; the sale of food and goods was forbidden, and though supplies were given away, not enough were available to forestall want. People became helpless and hopeless, denied a role in their own survival."

Solnit's chief argument is that community care, left to its own devices, represents a threat to power structures. In both San Francisco and New Orleans, she wrote, militarized response treated community members as the enemy. Armed soldiers were deployed to both cities to prevent "mayhem, chaos, and riotous behavior because many imagine that the absence of authority is equally the absence of order."

This view is the result of "society imagined by Hobbes and then the social Darwinists [which] appears to consist entirely of unaffiliated men," Solnit pointed out. "The relationships between lovers, spouses, parents and children, siblings, kinfolk, friends, colleagues, and compatriots are absent, though those are clearly among the more ancient rather than modern aspects of human life."

In short, she stated: "Anarchists are idealists, believing human beings do not need authorities and the threat of violence to govern them but are instead capable of governing themselves by cooperation, negotiation, and mutual aid."

Where the idealism falls apart

Reading A Paradise Built in Hell had me feeling hopeful and yet, sad. The idea of "cooperation, negotiation, and mutual aid" is fraught for those of us whose "normal" includes coercion, manipulation, and power imbalances – the same dynamics on display in The Walking Dead's most memorable antagonists.

Thus, those of us who have either never felt a sense of belonging, or whose sense of belonging has been eroded or even collapsed completely following layoff, divorce, disability, or other personal catastrophe, may be more cautious or even cynical about community and self-governance.

We've found these moments in our lives to be defining ones, not just in terms of "building character" for ourselves, but also in showing us who is "for us." People often report feeling shocked by the friends and even family who fade away or even choose unexpected sides following some personal disaster.

Then there's the work of trying to forge new relationships when you either don't have a strong enough foundation to do so, or – as with some disabilities – you've been quite literally isolated from common definitions of "community."

These outcomes can make it difficult to forge new friendships under the new circumstances. You question whom you can trust in your new vulnerability, aware that many people, unable to face their own shadow weaknesses, seem to exist to take advantage of, or even fetishize, vulnerability.

It can be small comfort to realize that the relationships you forged when you were your best self, were only surface level at best. I can't help drawing a parallel: just as the relationships you lost were only interested in the success you mirrored and aren't available to the "real" you, the people you seek now likewise may only be in it for this broken part of you – not your "whole self."

Or, as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote in her 2018 book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice:

"...what happens when we are, again, the crazy, hurting, deeply sad inside places? That are so different from the ones maybe so many outsiders know? When sometimes we ask for help on Facebook and miracles come through, and sometimes we do and our GoFundMe falls flat? When we are afraid that we were hurting six months ago, and we’re hurting now, and what is the tipping point when people start thinking, There they go again, they’re always freaking out."

Disaster is only another layer of survivorship

In writing for a more mainstream audience, Solnit may have glossed over the inclusivity I've found inherent in other works of anarchist literature. Towards the end of the book, describing "something of a latent disaster community already present throughout the United States and elsewhere," she included conservative churches together with counterculture communities, without noting that the latter often form to help those who feel outcast from the former.

Indeed, just because disasters bury or wash or blow or burn away the vestiges of "normal" doesn't mean that core parts of who we are don't remain. So, while to some extent it's true that we need to put our crap aside in service to others' needs, it's also true that we can't organize disaster responses without first forming and building relationships.

In the first six days after Hurricane Helene devastated my corner of the southeastern United States, when our home was without power and I'd realized my property damage was much less than others', I still felt overwhelmed by the logistics of storm cleanup. I had no real damage for insurance to cover. I didn't have a chainsaw or the skills to use one. And I knew my neighbors were dealing with their own property issues. How could I ask for help?

These fears had their underpinnings in Piepzna-Samarasinha's words:

"I did not have social capital. I was poor, not pretty, could not stop talking about the abuse I was experiencing and was just starting to have survived, and was sick with a chronic illness during a period of little to no disability community or respect for disability within social justice communities. Everybody was young and able-bodied and normalesque."

As is to be expected in a true disaster, none of my own fears ended up being relevant. In the following weeks, FEMA offered $750 payouts to help defray the kinds of costs I was facing. A volunteer network encouraged locals to help their neighbors with yard cleanup. One of my neighbors cut up the small tree down in my hard; another neighbor dug out the stump. Contractors came in later to remove all the storm debris.

But I had to wonder: without the intervention of FEMA, its state counterpart, and the emergency management apparatus they put in motion, would we in fact have been able to organize so effectively? How might I have negotiated without fearing my neighbors would believe I, a single mother, was trying to take advantage of their goodwill?

Solnit was quick to point out, in a May 2020 interview with Mother Jones, that during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, volunteers were quick to organize grocery runs for vulnerable people and improvise food systems to assist on a local level with supply chain disruptions.

These measures, though, require two conditions: first, that the people most in need are known to their neighbors or family members. And second, that those providing the aid focus on immediate survival needs. Longer term social and emotional needs are more complicated and thus, less efficient to address.

That's why, even though the COVID-19 pandemic also exposed other forms of vulnerability – adults and children, disabled and not, trapped in abusive relationships which frequently use manipulation to isolate – the goal was to get everyone back to "normal" schools and workplaces as quickly as possible.

So many opportunities were lost to us in those years, but as a survivor, the one that stands out to me is Piepzna-Samarasinha's because of its implications for those disabled by COVID as well as those of us dealing with older traumas during the pandemic:

"What if more survivors—and the therapists and healing spaces available to us—had a Mad, crip idea of healing, one that was not about cure but about increasing possibility, about learning, about trying to love all our survivor madness, and about shifting our communities to ones where crazy was really okay? What if there were models for long-term grief? Where we had more space in our jobs and homes where it was okay to grieve—like long-term lots of paid grief time off? What would it be like if our communities really, really believed that grief was sacred and valuable, a source of life-giving knowledge, instead of a pain in the ass? What if bad survivors were good survivors? What if all survivors were beautiful in our mess?"

Making room for the human mess

The 2024 anthology Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice, edited by Cindy Barukh-Milstein, contains a brief example of what this "what-if" might look like. Discussing one community they participated in, Milstein themself writes about how the group addressed "when one participant ignored many people's boundaries from emotional to logistical, material to physical and kept violating consent":

"... we chose to see everyone all of us as perfectly imperfect people always capable of transformation. We chose to strive to not merely do no further harm but rather aid each other in breaking patterns that arise from and/or cause trauma in ourselves and others. And even though we had, in the end, to ask that person to leave camp, we didn't dehumanize them or leave them out of these aspirations. Instead, we let love guide us.

"The ins and outs of how we did this aren't reducible to a how-to list, in the same way that love can't and shouldn't be quantified. That's almost certainly why this "accountability process" worked better than the vast majority of them. It wasn't a formulaic process; instead, it was embedded in bonds of love, expansively understood and intentionally nurtured by everyone's willingness to open up to and with each other. As such, we didn't begin or end by broadcasting rumor or drama to the whole camp. We didn't cancel anyone or make anyone disposable. We didn't think or act through binaries of good/ bad, nor a carceral or punishment logic.

"We listened. We believed. We held space for everyone's life stories, including the person who was pushing boundaries, and how people's past experiences shaped their present behaviors, feelings, and reactions. We held space, too, for how violations of consent can bring up a lot for everyone, whether receiver, giver, or eyewitness to the harm. We brought curiosity to how those stories and experiences can butt up against each other, intentionally or not, and how much this world that we so long to change has such power to turn us into people we don't want to be or can't see we've become."

It is nothing short of an act of bravery to show up in this way. Too often, I've found, people just aren't willing to have these conversations. Too many of us, I guess, have been burned by endlessly circular arguments with people who aren't willing to see others' points of view.

Add in the stress of disaster – where will I go, what will I eat, how do I clean this up – and you arrive at overwhelm. Naturally (at least for me, with my AuDHD and all that that entails) you'd choose the simple survival needs over the far more complicated human relations questions.

Arguably, forging the type of intentional relationality Milstein describes is best done pre-disaster. In another Constellations essay, artist and activist Benji Hart offered a nugget from a handbook written for members of a youth antiwar organization.

The handbook specifically addressed interpersonal safety through practice and accountability, attempting to communicate "not, 'You will never experience harm here,' but instead, 'If and when harm likely does happen, here are the ways we are collectively committing to responding to it,'" wrote Hart.

To this, I'd add the circumstances under which the work would continue when disrupted by forces outside our interpersonal control. Call it resilience, or continuity; the point is to commit to healing community members and communities by committing not to let the important work be interrupted or undone by disaster.

More to come on these ideas. Subscribe to join me as I explore!