“On one level I’m a lot more scared that the government isn’t going to come through. I don’t have faith in the government, or even large organizational city bodies or anything to come through in a natural disaster, and I live in the Bay Area, so I’m really scared about earthquakes. I don’t believe that anyone is going to come save me and that really freaks me out. Then also on a personal level I feel like the further down—I don’t know how to describe it, but there’s a depth to my understanding of pain and a depth to my understanding of joy. I was never a person who cried about happy things, but I find that I cry more often. I feel like I have a much stronger sense of the harshness of life and also the beauty. It’s like they’re one and the same.”
Welcome Home
After the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco became a landscape of ruin, but also of improvised outdoor community kitchens, tents, odd piles of salvaged stuff, lavish giveaways in a largely nonmonetary gift economy, lowered social boundaries, and humorous signs—and heartfelt signs, such as the Mizpah Café’s “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” As one of the witnesses described the scene, “When the tents of the refugees, and the funny street kitchens, improvised from doors and shutters and pieces of roofing, overspread all the city, such merriment became an accepted thing. Everywhere, during those long moonlit evenings, one could hear the tinkle of guitars and mandolins, from among the tents.” It resembles the campouts that have become a major part of counterculture gatherings since the 1960s, notably the biggest and longest-lived of them all, the Rainbow Gatherings held annually since the early 1970s.
They have bridged the gap between utopian experiment and traditional carnival, incorporating costuming, dancing, music, festivity, ceremony, and large-scale mingling. In creating an infrastructure to maintain weeks of communal life, the gatherings recall utopian communities, but in producing nothing practical and instead relying on resources garnered in the outside world, whether by Dumpster diving or putting it on a credit card, they are more like a festival. If you regard mainstream society as a disaster—some Rainbows call it Babylon—it makes sense to create the equivalent of a disaster community as an alternative and refuge from it. This is one of the arenas in contemporary society where revolution, disaster, and carnival converge into something namelessly new. The first Rainbow Gathering was in 1972, and it’s said that Vietnam vets with experience in setting up field kitchens, latrines, and hospitals were instrumental in creating the infrastructure. This emphasis on autonomous systems of survival—as the back-to-the-earth movement, among other things—is one of the overlooked legacies of the 1960s, arising from a sense that the mainstream was already a disaster (and maybe from childhoods spent amid scenarios of postatomic survival). The right-wing sur vivalist equivalents are notably less gregarious, focusing on pioneer-style nuclear-family units holed up alone and armed against everyone else.
Rainbow Gatherings, which now bring together about thirty thousand people to a different national forest location each year, build a functioning temporary society quite literally from the ground up. Each site is chosen for access to potable water, and an often elaborate piping system brings waters from source to camp. A group arrives early to set up, laying out the grounds and digging latrines, hugely important in preventing disease from spreading and fulfilling the commitment to leave behind an undamaged landscape. Another group stays behind to do cleanup. There is no formal structure or hierarchy, but a great deal of informal oganizing—all decisions are by consensus, anyone may participate, and volunteer groups perform all tasks. (Those who have been around a long time and done a lot of the work accrue power, but it is hard to call this hierarchy.) In addition to the national gathering in the United States each July (with a day of prayer and meditation on the Fourth), regional gatherings, a worldwide gathering, and gatherings in Canada, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia are now established. I have been to a regional Rainbow Gathering, and my response was mixed—I’m not big on clouds of pot smoke, hugs from strangers, hybridized religious appropriations, and grubby personal style—but I saw the desire and partial realization of a goal of creating a mutual-aid gift-economy society and an impressive and moving atmosphere of sweetness, openness, and generosity.
A crucial aspect of Rainbow Gatherings that was not true of Wood-stock in 1969 or Burning Man now is that it truly exists as far outside the monetary economy as possible. Burning Man, the huge annual desert gathering, charges a steep admission, patrols to keep the nonpaying out, hires a company to supply and maintain hundreds of chemical toilets, contracts a local hospital to set up a clinic on-site, and leaves all major decisions to the staff of the limited-liability corporation it has become. (Many of the paying attendees, however, create their own gift communities within their camps or with offerings of music, dance zones, drinks, and spectacle to the general public.) The Rainbow Family passes the hat, charges nothing, admits everyone, and food, sanitation, and medical care are all collective volunteer efforts (though the quality of care and cooking can be erratic). The kitchens are the hubs, and many Rainbows are devoted to their annual intensive of cooking and giving away food to strangers. It is a fuzzy but functioning version of the beloved community, an intentional version of disaster’s inadvertent communities, and arrivals at gatherings are routinely greeted with “Welcome home.”
When Katrina hit the Gulf region, the 2005 national gathering in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest had been over for more than a month. But many participants kept in touch and some converged on the disaster zone. One named Hawker wrote on September 22 of that year, “As the magnitude of the disaster began to sink in I started receiving phone calls from around the country from my Rainbow friends suggesting we go down and feed folks. What a great idea I thought. If anyone knew about keeping people healthy in a primitive setting and dealing with creating refugee camps it was Rainbow. Add to that that we knew each other already and we seemed like a natural.” His group settled in Waveland, Mississippi.
Hawker continued, “The whole town was wiped out by a 30-foot wave that took the town out completely. Almost nothing salvageable was left. Katrina was the great equalizer for this town, making poor and rich equals in the struggle for basic food, shelter, clothing and survival. . . . We arrived in the parking lot of a Fred’s food store and met a local Christian relief group from Bastrop Texas called Bastrop Christian Outreach Center. They were down there, as they said, ‘to just love on everyone as much as we can.’ That sounds like Rainbow to me. We joined forces in a common goal to serve and help as much as we could. We were two totally different groups united by a common cause. The relationship couldn’t have been better. We set up a common serving area but two kitchens, one of BCOC and one Rainbow. After time Rainbows went to the BCOC kitchens and BCOC folks came and helped in the Rainbow Kitchen. We become one together. We cooked, set up a ‘wall-less mart’ where people could get basic food, camping, clothing and other needs. We provided medical needs in our first aid tent (up the road Carolina Medical from Charlotte NC set up a larger mobile field hospital for more serious needs). But mostly we tried to give the town the love and support they needed. One of my favorite tasks was to sit down and eat dinner with locals each night. They usually couldn’t wait to tell you their stories. The days were long and the heat tremendous. This was the hardest I have ever worked as I got up at 7:00 am to work till midnights each night with sweat pouring down me all day in the 95-103 degree sun. Yet the faces who came each morning and thanked us for giving them hope made it all worth it.”
They were serving as many as four thousand meals a day, much of it food donated by the Organic Valley cooperative, in a geodesic dome tent donated by people from Burning Man. That a bunch of latter-day hippies found common ground with evangelical Christians is in some way typical of disasters; the crisis created circumstances in which their common goals mattered a lot and their divergent beliefs and lifestyles didn’t. Some of the churches were doing good works a century ago and may well be doing them a century from n
ow. Their stability has value. So does the instability of the counterculture groups, the ability to improvise and adapt. Disaster scholars like to talk about emergent organizations, organizations that arise in response to the needs of the moment. Emergent suggests one round of response—and often such groups appear to fulfill one task or one urgent round of needs and then dissolve. But Common Ground evolved from addressing something as urgent as medical care to something as long-term as wetlands reconstruction and still exists years later (and it is itself in some sense an outgrowth of the Black Panthers forty years before). What began as the Waveland kitchen would move from location to location, wherever the need was most urgent, broaden its offerings, adapt to its community, and shift both toward a formal nonprofit organizational structure, on the one hand, and giving over the roles and resources to the communities themselves, on the other, and then dissolve.
Some volunteers had been doing such work for decades before Katrina and as American Rainbow Rapid Response would continue doing it in other sites around North America afterward, from the U.S.-Mexico border to Wisconsin, where small towns and farmers working with Organic Valley cooperative were flooded in the summers of 2007 and 2008. The ability to metamorphose adaptively may be as valuable as the ability to survive as a distinct entity or agenda. Both churches and counterculture groups have been able to work small-scale and improvise with the communities they serve, rather than dispensing the one-size-fits-all aid that often issues forth from the largest organizations. Government disaster planning often presumes that volunteer efforts would work better with more centralized coordination, but the opposite is often true.
After Katrina, Rainbow Gathering regular Felipe Chavez was tending another kitchen, the Welcome Home Kitchen that set up in Washington Square Park just east of the French Quarter in New Orleans shortly after Katrina and was soon driven out. Nearly two years later, I ran into him in the Upper Ninth Ward at St. Mary’s of the Angels, cleaning the grill of a salvaged restaurant stove. St. Mary’s had allowed Common Ground and other volunteer groups to set up a base there, and a lot of people were moving through. Chavez, a Yaqui Indian from Tucson, Arizona, told me, “It’s unfortunate it takes disasters to bring people together, but in a way I feel like it was a miracle, and good things happen after that. One example of that is all these people coming to help and showing compassion. And in New Orleans, there’s a lot of people walking the streets that need shelter, that need help. There’s people that are off their meds and maybe dangerous, and there’s no place for them to be, so they need help and they just end up in jail. There’s still a lot of healing that needs to come to New Orleans.” The Rainbow Gathering had given Chavez that sort of help decades before. He was an alcoholic whose friend took him to a Rainbow Gathering in the late 1970s. There he was overwhelmed, burst into tears, was comforted by strangers, and turned his life around, both by reconnecting with his own indigenous heritage and by beginning a life of service.
On December 1, 2005, the New Waveland Café closed down, and much of the equipment and many of the crew moved to St. Bernard Parish, just across the line from the Lower Ninth Ward, to establish the Made with Love Café. Like the New Waveland, it was a community center where meals drew people in to receive everything from washing machines to social support. One of the Waveland volunteers, Mark Weiner, had taken it upon himself to organize it as a nonprofit, so that as the free supplies dried up they could apply for funding, and so that as the goodwill and energy of the disaster aftermath slackened, he could maintain a viable structure. A stocky, red-haired, earnest young man who had recently graduated from Columbia University, Weiner told me that he and the other young man who formalized the organization had not been part of the Rainbow Family but had been impressed by what they were doing—and many Rainbows came with them to the new project. Two years later, none remained, but their influence lived on. For Weiner, the key idea was a kitchen as the hub of a community space that could offer other practical and intangible forms of aid.
So in December of 2005, Weiner created a registered nonprofit called Emergency Communities. The name “was our third choice, and the other two were taken by bands. It has various meanings, it could be a noun in the sense that we are building an emergency community, each site is an emergency community. Or it can be the creation of a community from an emergency. But the idea is to blur the lines between those that are helping and those that need help into a single community.” It was a goal along the lines of Common Ground’s Solidarity, Not Charity. The Made with Love Café moved in January 2007 across the line to the Lower Ninth, where there were finally enough people to make use of such a facility, and the Comin’ Home Café opened. It was housed in a church building that had been gutted to a concrete floor, bare walls, and a roof, but it was on the main thoroughfare, St. Claude Avenue, and it had washers, dryers, computers, phones, and a big-screen TV on which Saints games were shown. In front were big oaks, full of screaming parrots, and a hand-painted Comin’ Home sign. In the back were two refrigerator trucks, a screened kitchen made to be disassembled and taken to the next volunteer site, and various vehicles in which volunteers lived. There was a small library, bright murals of a marching band of alligators and an alligator in an Emergency Communities apron, cheerful tablecloths on all the tables, and young volunteers moving purposefully around the building and the visitors.
Weiner was good at the art of the possible. Because a group of local youths got out of hand and intimidated other community members, EC hired security services from a large corporation, a step not in keeping with a lot of radical ideas of community. The actual guards, however, were locals who got on well with both community members and volunteers. The anarchic consensus model of the Rainbow Family didn’t last either. As with Common Ground, entrusting major and lasting decisions to transient members was problematic. Weiner thought that efforts like Emergency Communities had an ongoing future anywhere disaster hit. He wasn’t so sure its internal organization was such a model. He called it a benign dictatorship and added, “I’m more into democracy than that. I just happen to be the benign dictator.” Even so, his goal was to just provide aid and perhaps a catalyst for devastated communities to get back on their feet and take care of themselves—to give power away, not accumulate it. Emergency Communities also ran a community center in Buras, down on the peninsula south of New Orleans that got hammered as hard as any place by Katrina, and by the middle of 2007, the center had been handed back to the community to run, and St. Bernard had its own organizations in place. The Comin’ Home Café ran through late 2007.
When I first met Weiner, I thought he represented a move back to the mainstream from what the Rainbow Family had launched—until I found out he was the son of Maoist revolutionaries from the 1960s. He didn’t retain all his parents’ beliefs, but he did keep a critique of the mainstream and a sense of the malleability of society and its radical possibilities. Emergency Communities went through a remarkable evolution during its more than two years after Katrina, from a Rainbow Family project in a rural area to a new nonprofit in an urban one, from one in which the volunteers shared a background to one marked by diversity. It was an extreme example of the improvisation disaster brings, the ability to respond to changing circumstances in ways the larger nonprofits rarely can. It comes out of both the emergency that generated it and the long legacies of the unrest of the 1960s. That it ceased to exist is also a response to changing circumstances; but the thousands who came through to give or receive support were in many cases changed by the interactions. Dispersed throughout the world, they continue their activist work.
As sociologist Emmanuel David wrote to me, “What seems so beautiful about these groups is that many of them emerged spontaneously out of the specific conditions of the event. Now that the organizational structures are in place, the groups can enter (and some plan to and have entered) into other disasters. But the question is: can these emergent groups turned established groups function with the same level of improvisation/creativity that once char
acterized their actions? Or will these groups formalize, create policies and procedures, the same kind of mechanisms that bogged down the Red Cross, FEMA, and other organizations?” The answer varies from organization to organization.
Weighing the Balance
The volunteers are evidence that it doesn’t take firsthand experience of a disaster to unleash altruism, mutual aid, and the ability to improvise a response. Many of them were part of subcultures, whether conservative churches or counterculture communities, that exist as something of a latent disaster community already present throughout the United States and elsewhere. Such community exists among people who gather as civil society and who believe that we are connected, that change is possible, and who hope for a better earth and act on their beliefs. They remind us that though disasters can be catalysts to bring out such qualities, disasters do not generate them; they are constructed by beliefs, commitments, and communities, not by weather, seismology, or bombs. Some of these groups explicitly advocate for another kind of society; some are happy to repair and augment the existing one.
Years later, it is hard to weigh the balance. The original catastrophe of Katrina—the lack of an evacuation plan for the poor and frail, the ill-maintained levees—was the result of abandonment of social ties and investments. Yet despite the dire consequences of this social withdrawal, the answer to Katrina on the part of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and many others has been more abandonment, more privatization. They made of the catastrophe an opportunity to further conservative goals: they fired every public-school teacher in New Orleans and reinvented the school system as, largely, privatized charter schools less accountable to parents and taxpayers; they closed public housing in the city at a time when the need for homes was desperate, rents were escalating, and the huge projects were some of the most intact housing left in many neighborhoods; they let Charity Hospital, for generations the source of most health care for the poorest, stay dead; reduced public transit by 80 percent; and through lousy management increased the burden of returnees by such acts as demolishing Holy Ground Baptist Church without bothering to contact the pastor or congregation, who were in the process of rebuilding the church. Some of these were fiscal decisions on the part of a hard-hit city, but the desire to privatize the system and shut out the poor was an ideological choice. In countless ways the state and federal government magnified and expanded these losses. In 2008 the billions of dollars of aid supposed to be available to rebuild were just beginning to be released. These were not responses to disaster, but expansions of it.
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