Wages of Rebellion (5 page)

This is the new America. It is an America where economic and environmental catastrophes will converge to trigger systems breakdown and collapse. It is an America that, as things unravel, will increasingly sacrifice the weak, the poor, and the destitute.

The emotional cost of the storm for the victims was often as devastating as the physical cost. Tzenis, who was born in Cyprus and immigrated to the United States with her husband in 1956, listed for me her
mounting bills. Since the storm, the septuagenarian had paid a plumber $2,000, but that did not cover all the plumbing work that needed to be done. A contractor gave her an estimate of $40,000 to $50,000 for repairs, which included ripping out the walls and floors. Tzenis had received a $5,000 check from an insurance company, Allstate, and a $1,000 check from FEMA. But $6,000 would not begin to cover the cost of repairing her house.

“The insurance company told me I didn’t have the water insurance,” she said. “The contractor said he has to break all the walls and floors to get the mold out. I don’t know how I am going to pay for this.”

As she spoke, Josh Ehrenberg, twenty-one, an aspiring filmmaker, and Dave Woolner, a thirty-one-year-old electrician with Local 52, both volunteers with Occupy Sandy, hauled waterlogged and ruined items out of her garage. They put them in green plastic garbage bags.

“My husband had dementia,” she told me softly. “I took care of him for six years with these two hands. For a few months the insurance gave me help. Certain medications they pay after six years. They told me once he couldn’t swallow no more there was nothing we could do.… He died at home last year.”

She began to sob.

She muttered, “Oye, oye, oye.”

“I was going to hang myself in the closet,” she said in a hoarse whisper, gesturing to the hall closet behind me. “I can’t take life anymore. My husband. Now this. I don’t sleep good. I jump up every hour watching the clock. I’ve been through a lot in my life. Every little thing scares me. I’m on different pills. I’ve come to the age where I ask why doesn’t God take me. I pray a lot. I don’t want to give my soul to the devil because they would not put me in a church to bury me. But you get to an age where you are only able to take so much.”

She fell silent. She told me about the bombing of Cyprus during World War II. She said that as a girl she watched a British military airport go up in flames after German and Italian bombs hit it. She talked about the 1950s struggle for Cypriot independence that took place between the British and the underground National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, known as EOKA.
She said she wished there was another strong populist leader such as the Cypriot Archbishop Makarios III, who openly defied British authorities in the island’s campaign for independence.

“People were hung by the British soldiers,” she said. “Women were raped. People had their fingernails pulled out. They were tortured and beaten. My cousin was beaten so badly in jail he was bleeding from his bottom.”

The horrors of the past had merged with the horrors of the present.

“They say [hurricanes like] this will happen again because the snow is melting off all the mountains,” she said. “It never flooded here before. No matter how hard it rained, not a drop came through the door. But now it has changed. If it happens again, I don’t want to be around.”

I left her and walked down the street, where I found Rene Merida, twenty-seven, standing on the corner. His house on Emmons Avenue, like all the houses in the neighborhood, did not have electricity, running water, or heat. He and his pregnant wife and two children, ages seven and four, huddled inside the ruined home at night. They fled periodically to live for a few days with relatives. Merida, who had recently lost his job as an ironworker, managed to reach his landlord once on the phone. That had been three weeks earlier. It was the only time the landlord, despite Merida’s persistent calls, answered.

“He told me it [the repair] will get done when it gets done,” Merida said. “The temperature inside my house is fifteen degrees. I got a thermometer to check.”

The state provided little in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane to those affected by the storm. Volunteers hastily collected food in church basements and drove it out to the devastated communities. I made my way to the 123-year-old St. Jacobi Evangelical Lutheran Church; founded by German immigrants, it served as one of the Brooklyn distribution centers. Lauren Ferebee, originally from Dallas, with short auburn hair and black frame glasses, sat behind a table in the chilly basement of the church. On large pieces of cardboard hanging from the ceiling were the words Occupy S
ANDY RELIEF
. The basement was filled with stacks of donated supplies, including pet food, diapers, infant formula, canned goods, cereal, and pasta. The church was converted two
days after the storm into a food bank and distribution center. Hundreds of people were converging daily on the church to work in the relief effort, and volunteers with cars or vans were delivering supplies to parts of New York and in New Jersey.

Ferebee, a playwright, and hundreds of other volunteers had instantly resurrected the Occupy movement when the tragedy hit to build structures of support and community. As we descend into a world where we can depend less and less on those who hold power, movements like Occupy will become vital. These movements might not be called Occupy, and they might not look like Occupy. But whatever the names and forms of the self-help we create, we will have to find ways to fend for ourselves. And we will fend for ourselves only by building communitarian organizations.

“We have a kitchen about fifty blocks from here where we cook and deliver hot food,” Ferebee said. “We take food along with supplies out to distribution hubs. There is a distribution hub about every thirty or forty blocks. When I first went out, I was giving water to people who had not had water for six days.”

She sat in front of a pile of paper sheets headed “Occupy Sandy Dispatch.” Various sites were listed on the sheets, including Canarsie, Coney Island, Red Hook, the Rockaways, Sheepshead Bay, Staten Island, and New Jersey. As we spoke, Roman Torres, forty-five, came up to the table. We began to speak in Spanish. He told me he sang on weekends in a band that played Mexican folk music. He had pulled his van up in front of the church, and he told Ferebee he was ready to make deliveries. Torres had been coming two days a week to transport supplies.

“Can you go anywhere?” Ferebee asked Torres.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Can you do a couple of drop-offs at the Rockaways?” she inquired.

“Yes, if someone comes with me,” he said.

Torres fixed himself a cup of coffee in the church kitchen while volunteers carried boxes from the basement outside into the rain. They loaded the boxes into the back of his van.

“We can’t ever get enough electric heaters, cleaning supplies, tools, and baby supplies,” Ferebee lamented.

I walked up the stairs to the communications and dispatch room. I ran into Juan Carlos Ruiz, a former Roman Catholic priest who was born in Mexico. He took me to his small apartment, and we had a coffee at a small wooden table. Ruiz was the church’s community organizer. It was his decision once the storm hit to open the doors of the church as a relief center. He did not know what to expect.

“It was Tuesday night,” he said. “We got three bags of groceries and two jars of water. It was the next morning that volunteers began to appear. By the first weekend, we had over 1,300. It was organized chaos. There was all this creative energy and youth. There was an instant infrastructure and solidarity. It is mutual aid that is the most important response to the disasters we are living through. This is how we will retain our humanity. Some members of the church asked me why these [volunteers] did not come to the church service. I told them the work they were doing was church. The commitment I saw was like a conversion experience. It was transformative. It restores your faith in humanity.”

T
he consequences of worsening climate change, along with stagnant and declining economies, will trigger mass migration, widespread famine, the spread of deadly infectious diseases, and levels of human mortality that will dwarf those of the Black Death, which between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries ravaged Asia and Europe. In the fourteenth century alone, the Black Death is estimated to have taken 200 million lives. Scientists now fear that changing climate patterns could lead to its reemergence. Black rats, the bacterium’s hosts, have already reappeared in Great Britain.
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Rising sea levels and soaring temperatures will make parts of the planet uninhabitable. More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if we continue to refuse to respond to climate change, estimates a report commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a partnership of twenty developing countries threatened by climate change. The thawing of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will
see the steady rising of sea levels by an estimated 2.3 meters (7 feet, 6 inches) in the next 2,000 years, assuming temperatures stay at current levels. The rising sea levels will create chaos across the globe as coastal cities and island states are flooded.
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As poorer societies around the globe unravel—many of them no longer able to impose the order of organized states—and as our own depressed communities are wrecked, shoddily patched back together, and then wrecked again, the same inchoate hatreds and bloodlusts for vengeance and retribution that I witnessed in disintegrating states such as the former Yugoslavia will be unleashed. Crisis cults, those bizarre messianic movements defined by a belief in magic and mystical religious fervor, will arise, as they did in medieval and Reformation Europe and among the Sioux at the end of the Indian wars. The armed thugs and gangs of warlords—which were common in the war in Bosnia—will storm through blighted landscapes looting, pillaging, and killing. This is already a reality to those affected by the severe droughts in Africa. Recent migrants, religious and ethnic minority groups, undocumented workers, foreign nationals, and homosexuals, indeed all who do not conform to the idealized image of the nation, buttressed by a mythical narrative about a lost golden age, will become the enemy and, for many, the cause of our distress.

Hunger and constant drought, especially in the poorer parts of the globe, will force populations to carry out armed raids and internecine wars to survive and lead many others to flee for more temperate zones. An estimated 200 million climate refugees, most from the equatorial regions of the globe, will descend by the middle of this century on Europe and other industrialized countries, according to figures cited in a study from Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network.
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The industrialized states, anxious to preserve dwindling resources and avoid being overrun by destitute hordes, will become ringed fortresses. Democratic rights and constitutional protections will most likely be obliterated. This may be the best we can hope for. The worst will be the complete collapse of our ecosystem and the extinction of the human species. Neither scenario is pleasant.

No act of rebellion can be effective, much less moral, unless it first takes into account reality, no matter how bleak that reality. As our lives
become increasingly fragile, we will have to make hard decisions about how to ensure our own survival and yet remain moral beings. We will be called upon to fight battles, some of which we will have no hope of winning, if only to keep alive the possibility of compassion and justice. We will depend on others to survive. This is not the world most of us desire, but it is the world that will probably exist. The greatest existential crisis we face is to at once accept what lies before us—for the effects of climate change and financial instability are now inevitable—and yet find the resilience to fight back.

C
ivilizations have followed a familiar pattern of disintegration from Sumer to Easter Island. The difference this time is that there will be no new lands to conquer, no new people to subjugate, and no new resources to plunder. When the unraveling begins, it will be global. At first, parts of the globe will be safer and more amenable to life. But any sanctuary will be temporary.