Diehards in an Open World

Inoculation, Mounds and Diehards in an Open World

By John Taylor; 25 September, 2005

My neurons are a weird pain weather vane and although since I have
changed my diet and increased exercise the migraines are fewer, a
major weather event like Hurricane Katrina invisibly blows me away,
even from such a distance and with its force blown. A week after
Katrina died out a friend pointed out that its backwash in Ontario was
all that rain, the flooding of her basement, etc...

"Ah," thought I, "that must be why I was suffering that slow burning
migraine just around then!"

Thus I learned that even with somewhat improved health that I still
must watch carefully the weather reports, even if it means breaking my
no network television rule. And now it is Rita educating me in
vulnerability. I must say, for me Rita is no slow burn like Katrina,
she is scraping out my skull with a razor edged scoop. Hard as this
is, my prime thoughts and prayers go for those in the front line of
this weather battle, especially the residents of Houston and New
Orleans. God save us, our only salvation. Baha'u'llah wrote in a
prayer:

"The winds of tests are powerless to hold back them that enjoy near
access to Thee from setting their faces towards the horizon of Thy
glory, and the tempests of trials must fail to draw away and hinder
such as are wholly devoted to Thy will from approaching Thy court."

My plan for this month has been to write a quickie book on how to
speed our response to disasters like the Southeast Asian tsunami of
Boxing Day, and now these last two hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. I
still might fulfill the goal, given a miracle. Preparing this project,
I've gone over my "open year" essays, a tedious task that I normally
avoid because it feels so wrong, narcissistic, autophagic, whatever.
My reluctance to read my own writing is bred in the bone -- to produce
new material I must live a myth that all my past writing was garbage;
only today's essay matters. Reading over the open year essays for that
reason is humbling and discouraging, the output of that year -- from
the summer of 2003 to the summer of 2004 -- was prolific and
impressive, my hour of creative glory. Unfortunately for me it was
like fireworks, temporary, spreading in all directions and flaring
out. It was not planned, directed or focused. Due to constant
migraines, the writing was perforce scattered, personal, all over the
place. But for all that, it was my one Annus Mirabilis. I know in my
heart that I will probably never do better. I laid then the
philosophical groundwork for what I hope will be my first finished
book, working title: Open World.

Thinking over what I was trying to get at I realize now that I left
out the core idea. Only now is an unearthly apparition taking
corporeal form. The distinctive mark of the plan of Open World has to
be "mound architecture," elongated earthworks or berms with buildings
dug into the side. That is what I am working out now, and it is not
easy or quick, especially with Rita working me over. I am reading
Jared Diamond's Collapse, and trying to get a hold of a new book
called "Wisdom of Crowds," which I think will be important for
understanding the consultative challenges involved in this initiative.

An interesting sidelight to the present emergencies is a phenomenon I
wrote about in the open year, one that the House in the early 1980's
called "inoculation." In spite of modern communications and sometimes
well organized emergency response mechanisms, at first many lives in
New Orleans were needlessly lost because of inoculation, what you
could call the "boy who called wolf" syndrome. People hear a warning
repeatedly -- be it words like "God" or "Baha'i," or in this case
emergency evacuation orders -- and conclude that since the hubbub came
to nothing so often before there is no threat.

"I know this danger well and I can safely ignore what I am being told.
I will stay put."

This strange diehard response was reduced in Houston threatened by
Rita for several reasons, one being simply because people had just
seen what happened to New Orleans diehards under Katrina. This is not
an issue only for specialists in governance and public health, it is a
general problem of communications, which depend upon love. Suicidal
refusals are a spiritual issue as much as a practical one. Taken all
in all, loss of life from both terror and disaster is not primarily a
result of breakdowns of support or communication so much as lack of
trust between individual and society, and ultimately between humans
and God. Pump up the love and the trust, and the system responds
robustly.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com