On fire, power, and our communal immune system
On that Tuesday night I realized my home was old and uninsulated. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I didn’t know it was built in 1924 and that it was drafty. But Tuesday night, that draft became the way my home filled with smoke in minutes. What had seemed on Monday like a doable situation of “lots of wind” — By Tuesday night, when I arrived at my partner’s house, after the scariest drive of my life, what having a house built in 1924 meant was something wholly different than it had meant the day before.
Before I say anymore, I want to say that. WE are living in a house built in 1933. It is old and uninsulated. The last decade and their emergencies have been a stark reminder for some and a realization for others that its age and its structural build is not enough to meet the challenges that come with a multiracial, multicultural and digital world in the middle of a climate crisis. We need different ways to distribute aid, technical infrastructure, a refurbishing of the energy grid as a whole, a rethinking of emergency response in a climate emergency, a rethinking of how the state communicates with us, we need to train people in new skills and give them responsibilities in an emergency situation, we need to create rules and regulations that keep a single individual from having the power of a nation state, and sooooo much more.
So instead of looking at all that has happened and all that ails us and make priorities based on what we’re learning — we keep putting up tape on the windows (aka more police) and complaining about the house. The house needs a major overhaul. We need an entire redesign of how we work, move, prioritize, make tradeoffs, create, distribute power, and engage with information. We have to make decisions about what you do with an aging country without the infrastructure it needs to thrive.
The fire felt familiar, having been one of the first wave Covid patients in March 2020 and being sick for three months and disabled for close to 5 years now — it had a similar shock, sadness, and bewilderment to it. In the time since I was sick, my immune system became a savior and mutineer. Taming it, being in relationship with it, understanding what it’s telling me became the project of my life.
So I can see our immune system as a set of communities doing the same. My experience of Long Covid and lupus is watching my body constantly overreact and miss the lesson. Small allergens will enter my body and my body thinks it needs to mount a full scale attack. It also uses pain to tell me when my temperature can’t seem to catch up to the environment and needs help. It signals when because of the condition of my body, I need to slow down, even in times when my human reaction is to speed up.
This week as I watched my neighbors across the county show up for each other, I thought a lot about immune systems. What it looks like to watch our county fail to prepare the house for climate change but watch my neighbors show up to protect each other. We’ve taken all that pain and let it wake us to each other. How heartbreakingly beautiful.
I’ve also seen the mutineer immune system have its way. So many of us can recognize how absolutely WILD it is to watch this broligarchy buy their way into even MORE wealth and power. Their resources could refurbish the house and prepare it for what’s to come. Instead, they choose again to enrich themselves while people quite literally die. And yet, with that knowledge in our pockets we have started to attack any and everyone with even a little bit of power. It’s like we have cancer and send all the chemo therapy to attack a head cold.
Much how I understand it with my body — when your internal systems cease to work you start swinging at anything that will give you release. We have often decided in those moments to punch each other in the face instead of aiming at the true source of the problem.
I’m a week into living in my partner’s house, and while I’m very lucky my home didn’t burn down, the smoke has made it unlivable for now. And when I go back, I will know my home (that I rent) not just as the beautiful refuge that I built for myself, but I will know how unready it is to protect me. That grief is a true grief. The inability for things to go back to what they were. I feel like I’ve watched that grief land in stages for many people — impacted severely by class, gender, and race — across the country for over a decade now and lovingly reminded by elders just how far back it all stretches. The canaries in the coal mine started dying long ago — the country just keeps deciding to go in anyway. What else would we call the election of an authoritarian President.
I’m left to wonder — when will we collectively decide to be to each other what my neighbors were this week. When do we choose LIFE? Good, juicy, easeful, complex, multiple truth holding life? I hope soon. Because the house will either kill us or it will edify us and that is some of what little control we have right now.
