It Could Happen Here - Into The Wild Orange Yonder

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

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You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 2. Into the Wild Orange Yonder. For the first three days after the shooting, you didn't talk to anyone. None of your friends or family seemed to know what to say. You took off from work, cloistered yourself away in your house, and drank. You're not sure why, but your brain wouldn't let you listen to any of the outreach that came your way. Until Erin texted you. She was a local organizer. You'd met

her last year at a protest, and she'd struck you as an unusually outgoing person. Y'all barely knew each other, but when she heard about what happened, she reached out. She offered to put you into contact with a friend of hers, Tom, a combat veteran who'd seen some shit overseas. She said he might understand some of what you were going through. You'd called him, eventually, and talking to Tom had helped. Still, it was two weeks after the shooting when you finally felt good enough to leave your home. You'd pretty much disconnected yourself from social media in the interim, and upon diving media in the interim, and upon diving back into the world, you were surprised to see that everyone was freaking out over a heat dome destined to settle over your city in the coming days. No one knew quite how

hot it could get. Weathermen would only quote a range of possible temperatures, but everyone said it might break the city's all-time high heat record. That seemed hyperbolic to you. The world was warming, you didn't doubt that, but that heat record had held solid since the 1990s. You might have taken it all more seriously if you hadn't been so overwhelmed with your own shit. By the time you were semi-functional again, temperatures had already started to crest above 115 during the heat of the day. At 118 degrees, the airport started canceling certain flights. Some smaller planes, like the Bombardier CRJ, couldn't handle those temperatures. The news assured you that big planes, the ones made by Airbus and Boeing, could handle up to 126 degrees.

There was no way it would get that hot. But it hit 120, and then the next day, it hit 123, breaking the old record for the first time in decades. More flights were canceled, but you were doing okay. It was easy enough to sit inside with your air conditioning and wait out the weather. During a press conference, the city assured everyone that the grid would hold up to the strain. This isn't Texas or California, the mayor assured everybody. We can handle this. You woke up the next morning, boiling in your sheets. The power was out. Even in the early morning, it was almost 110 outside. You gulped down water, stumbled to your car, and turned on the AC to see what the hell was happening. Localized brownouts, the city, through local news,

happening. Localized brownouts, the city, through local news, assured you. And so you decided to pass the time in your private AC box by driving to the gas station to fill up your car. A lot of other people had the same idea, though. There were lines around every station. People were filling up their cars, but also jerry cans and even bags of gasoline. You drive around for a few minutes, looking for any place not swarmed with customers, until you see your first out-of-gas sign. Then you drive straight to the nearest station and wait, 20 minutes, for a chance to fill up. You're one of the last people at the station to top off. The out-of-gas sign goes up just as you exit the parking lot. On your way back home, you see crowds of people outside the few stations that haven't run dry.

Several people are yelling at each other, fighting over access to the pump. You see one man waving a rifle while another fills an enormous plastic moving crate with gasoline. Where the hell are the cops, you wonder? The answer to that question comes a few hours later in the day. Without power, your office is shut down, and there's little point staying indoors where it's even hotter than outside. Erin reaches out and asks if you're free today. You say yes, and she pulls you into a signal loop where a few dozen other folks have organized cooling stations for some of the local homeless camps. Since you drive a hybrid car with a big full tank, you agree to help distribute cool water and electrolyte packets. The first couple hours go well. You swing

by a few little tent communities where houseless people bake under shade structures and try to cool off with wet towels and iced water bottles. Given the power situation, you're impressed that so many local activists had the presence of mind to freeze water before the heat wave. You're also impressed by the different solar arrays you see at encampments, often wired together from battery packs and cast-off panels wealthier people bought to go camping. Between the fans and the ice, most of the folks you meet seem like they'll get through the day alive. In between stops, you keep checking the local news. They aren't referring to the outages as rolling blackouts anymore. The term grid failure has grown more and more common. Around 2 p.m., as temperatures crack 129 degrees, you get a notification that the airport has canceled all flights due to a heat

emergency. Earlier in the day, you saw several older cars pull off to the side of the road, smoke billowing from their engines. When you pull into your last encampment of the day, located beneath an overpass, you see an old Saab and two old Fords parked nearby. Their drivers and passengers are huddled under the shade of the encampment, wet towels over their faces and necks. Most of the passengers look to be middle class. They're well-dressed, clearly uncomfortable with the homeless people handing them water to ward off heat stroke.

As you walk up, you hear one older woman chattering at one of the encampment dwellers while he wets a towel for her. I'm sorry to intrude. We went to the store to see if we could pick up some fans and we just ran out of gas on the way back. No one has fuel. We couldn't even run a generator to get the fans going if we were back home. Best to wait it out here anyways, the man next to her says. The freeway's a parking lot. Everyone who can is bolting out of town, heading somewhere higher and cooler. Radio says a bunch of people died already when their cars broke down and they cooked by the side of the road. You hand out the last of your supplies to the encampment's grateful residents. Before you turn back to your car, you check your phone to

see if your neighbor texted you that the power was back on. No news. You aren't sure if you really want to head back to your house in the middle of all this. The overpass might be more comfortable. Someone set up two large kiddie pools filled with water, there's music, and solar-charged batteries to keep your phone topped off. All things considered, it's one of the more comfortable places you could wait out the heat wave. As you mull this over, you notice flashing lights as a half-dozen police cars and a riot van pull up by the overpass. It all happens so quickly that you stand there, stunned for a moment, as officers begin to form ranks on the far side of the encampment.

You look behind you, just in time to see more cars pull up, including one large cruiser with an LRAD on its back. This is the police department, they say. This encampment is a fire hazard. The mayor has declared a state of emergency. You all need to disperse now. All around you, encampment residents and activists begin to pick up shields, pipes, and bottles. They form crude lines to face off against the riot officers marching in from both sides. Your heart starts to pound.

You see the normies, the ones not too sick with heat stroke to stand, start glancing around in the same way you are, trying to weigh the best of their options. Most of them are stuck here. But you still have a nearly full tank of gas. You can get away. For now, at least. In 2011, exactly a decade ago as I typed this, my partner and I drove 11 or so hours south from our home in Dallas to the border town of Marfa, Texas. Back then, Marfa had a population of about 2,500. It's a beautiful place, surrounded by the kind of wild scrub brush desert that outsiders assume most Texans live in. Marfa is famous as the former home of artist Donald Judd, and as a result, the whole place has a strange vibe, a mix of rural South Texas grit and woo-woo artsy flair. We'd chosen to visit in April, traditionally one of

the mildest months for Texan weather, but it was unreasonably warm when we arrived, and the whole state had suffered through a bizarrely dry spring. As we drove into town, we saw smoke on the far horizon. We didn't know it then, but an electrical short in an abandoned building had sparked what would eventually grow into the Rock House Fire. We lived out of my Prius and motels at that point, and we spent most of the day driving or staggering from bar to bar to a rad grilled cheese restaurant, talking to locals while we watched the flames burn across the horizon. We saw the fire eat Mount Marathon, and we sat on the deck of a bar talking to locals who had driven what possessions they could into town and then abandoned their homes to the blaze. There goes my house, someone would say, pointing to local news coverage and ordering another round. While we drank and gawked, nearby ranchers were cutting

their fences. There was no time to evacuate the herds, so the best they could do was cut holes in the barbed wire and give the animals a slim chance of fleeing to safety. By the time night fell, the whole horizon burned. Every government building in Marfa was empty. There were no cops. Everyone was a firefighter that night. We eventually headed to a nearby motel. The door to the office was empty and the lights were on. On the desk was a bucket of keys and a sign informing us that the owners were both volunteer firefighters and that we should just take a key and pay in the morning. The Rock House fire would eventually burn more than 314,000 acres in two counties. It marked the beginning of a historic wildfire season in Texas.

Over the next six months, more than 31,453 fires would burn a total of 4 million acres, or 16,000 square miles, an area larger than Switzerland. Ten years later, almost to the month, my new home state of Oregon was hit by an unprecedented heat dome. Temperatures in the state capital neared 119 degrees, seven degrees hotter than it has ever been in Dallas. Crops died, along with more than a billion sea creatures along the northwest coast. The verdant woods of the Pacific Northwest dried out and caught fire. As I type this, the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon is the largest in state history.

It has burnt over 300,000 acres and it is still not contained. It started less than a year after an unprecedented series of wildfires blanketed much of northern Oregon in orange clouds of smoke that choked every living creature for weeks. For a brief span of time, tree-filled Portland had lower air quality than New Delhi, India. presented by I Heart and Sonorum, an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The heat dome that just hit us landed alongside articles telling us it was a once-in-a-thousand-years weather event. I read similar articles earlier this year year when I was with my family back in Dallas, watching an unprecedented blizzard drop temperatures below zero for the first time in Texas history. One man, two once-in-a-millennia weather events in the same six-month span. Texas's infamously idiosyncratic power grid buckled under the strain of so many homes putting their heaters on full blast. The state only narrowly avoided a complete grid collapse that would have left much of it powerless for months. Between 476 and 978 Texans died in a single week from a mix of carbon monoxide poisoning, exposure, and ice-related crashes.

In Oregon, during the heat dome, northwestern asphalt roads buckled and power cables to streetcars frayed. northwestern asphalt roads buckled, and power cables to streetcars frayed, Portland was forced to shut down its Max Light rail line, stranding many poor and elderly citizens inside their overheated homes. At least 116 people died in Oregon. Nearly 500 people died in British Columbia. During the worst of the heatwave, Oregon Governor Kate Brown and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler were nowhere to be found. Like most wealthy people, they fled to more comfortable climes, or at least air conditioning,

while those who could not escape suffered or died. The same story played out in Canada, where the Vancouver City Planning Commission issued a scathing report about the other lack of preparation on behalf of the city government. Quote, failing to act and create policy that reflects the reality of people's lives can and will cause people who would otherwise be alive to die. Where government failed, normal people were forced to take matters into their own hands. Mutual aid cooling stations were organized and set up across Portland, Eugene, and Salem, providing people with wet towels, frozen water bottles, and shade. One homeless man set up an above-ground swimming pool beneath an overpass. In Salem, police repeatedly destroyed cooling stations under the guise of breaking up homeless encampments. These gestures were, in the grand scale of the calamity, fairly minor,

but they illustrate an important point. When disaster strikes, communities nearly always respond more effectively than governments. This is a well-documented phenomenon in the field of disaster response studies. In 1962, when 9.2 magnitude earthquake hit the Alaskan coast, Anchorage was utterly devastated. Whole neighborhoods fell off of cliffs. The first thing the police did was deputize a crowd of half-drunk volunteers to stop people from looting, even though no looting had been observed. The police chief was so worried about disorder that he almost instantly suspended the search for survivors. Thankfully, the people of Anchorage were not so easily scared. Spontaneously

organized groups of civilians pulled every survivor from the rubble. By the next day, volunteers had organized, with no input from the government, a manpower control team, where people with skills—carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and the like—were matched up with jobs that needed doing. As it happened, a team of social scientists from Ohio State University were in town, studying disaster response under a grant from the U.S. military. Based on the science of the time, they expected sheer panic. Here's what they found instead, from a write-up by James Meigs in Commentary Magazine. Quote,

The team stayed for a week and interviewed nearly 500 people. Enrico Quarantelli, the leader of the study, was particularly interested in Anchorage's small civil defense office. It should have been in charge of search and rescue, but, Quarantelli noted, had quickly become bogged down over questions of bureaucratic protocol. Of course, Bill Davis's amateur mountaineers had taken over that function almost immediately. Quarantelli used the term emergent groups to describe the teams of self-organized volunteers like Davis's searchers. He didn't miss the irony that the agency created to protect civilians soon became an obstacle that this emergent group of rescuers had to work around. We are standing, all of us, on the cusp of an age of the unprecedented, a time when most people are likely to experience once-in-a-millennium disasters on a near-annual

basis. The only thing we can truly know about our unknowable future is that this is a problem our present governments cannot and will not fix. We will cover that idea in more depth later, but for now it's important to accept that help is not coming. When the wildfires blanketed Oregon in smoke last year, the state responded by handing out lucrative logging contracts to their political donors. This was done under the guise of wildfire preparedness. All it really did was release more carbon into the atmosphere. The fires still came. When Texas's power grid failed in February, the company that administers

it, ERCOT, made $2.4 billion. Conservative politicians took to social media to defend Texan independence. Lawmakers turned their efforts to legalizing permitless concealed carry and restricting voting rights. ERCcott donated $1 million to Governor Abbott, and he refused to call for grid reforms during a special session of the state legislature. Nothing was done to fix the grid, and when the first summer heat waves hit, Ercott asked citizens to keep their thermostats at 80 degrees while they slept. When some people with health conditions attempted to cool their homes further, they found that their new connected thermostats raised the temperature without their consent.

The failure of our elites to handle the disasters wrought by climate change is not the result of a grand conspiracy. More than anything, it is the result of selfishness and confusion. Most of these people are just as blindsided by the disasters wracking our world as anyone else. Because they're the kind of people who are capable of taking power, they look out for themselves first, and in chaotic and dangerous times, they default to what they know best, leaning on culture war bullshit and hiding from scrutiny. There are a couple of military concepts that I find helpful for analyzing times like these. One is VUCA, V-U-C-A, an acronym that identifies situations of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. VUCA situations are obviously dangerous, but the sheer amount of information coming in can be blinding,

and the best course of action is generally unclear. Elites are actually more likely to be blinded in these situations than the rest of us. A mayor or a police chief or a president has much more information incoming, and his concern in a heat wave is always more complex than what needs to be done to protect people, because what is politically safe, what do my donors want, and how will what I do be spun by the media are also on his mind. Ultimately, people like us worry, will my community and I survive, and people like them worry, will I lose power? This tug of war between disaster and political expediency, between preparing for the inevitable and protecting your ass,

leads to a phenomenon called turboparalysis. This was first coined back in 2012 by a fellow named Mark Lind, and he described it as, quote, combination of vigorous and dramatic motion with the absence of steady movement in any particular direction. You may recognize this as an apt description of how our nation has handled climate change for the last several decades. I want to quote here from a very useful document titled The Gonzo Futurist Manifesto, quote, In this reading, a sudden spike of VUCA dynamics causes big actors, big business, nation-states, organizations to flail wildly, muddying the waters with U-turns and knee-jerk cargo cult

behavior as the old certainties are swept away. For cyberpunk archdeacon Bruce Sterling, this is the transition to nowhere. There's neither progress nor conservatism because there's nothing left to conserve and no direction in which to progress. From the U.S. Republican Party to Occupy Wall Street, from Benghazi to Wukong, wheels are spinning furiously and engines are being gunned to no effect. Now, politicians can afford to spin their wheels indefinitely, or at least as long as the political system they thrive in continues to exist. Many powerful actors, like fossil fuel companies and defense contractors, thrive so long as the rest of us stay locked in this place. But you and I cannot survive in a state of turboparalysis. As I noted earlier, it's easy to avoid that in the moment of a disaster,

if you're a regular person looking at a problem and finding ways to mitigate the damage. Mutual aid in response to calamity is the norm. But when it comes to the bigger question, how are we going to survive in this world? How can my community adapt to be less vulnerable? How can we stop things from spinning out of control? Well, that's when turbo paralysis kicks in again. Because we don't have the luxury of just dealing with climate change and its consequences. We've got gangs of fascists marching through city streets, ever more powerful and violent cops murdering people and gassing dissent, children in cages on the border, and my god, when you start to list it all, or try to take it all in on Twitter, you're liable to have a panic attack.

As much positive as I've said about mutual aid, I want to acknowledge here that it alone is not enough. It can't be. A good example of why comes just this year from India. Their right-wing central government so thoroughly botched the COVID-19 response that corpse fires were burning in the streets of almost every major city. Hospitals took to Twitter to beg for oxygen. The government suddenly adopted a liberalized vaccine policy that put the onus for vaccine procurement on individual states, which led to nine corporate hospital chains acquiring half the available vaccine doses. Rather than go door-to-door handing out vaccines, which is how India wiped out polio,

doses cost about $16 in a country where 134 million people make less than $2 a day. In response to the utter failure of its elites, the Indian people took matters into their own hands, and I want to quote now from a wonderful write-up in the Baffler titled, How It Feels. Confronted by the complete breakdown of the state's healthcare infrastructure, ordinary civilians did that most Indian thing, the state's healthcare infrastructure, ordinary civilians did that most Indian thing, jugad, a commonly used Hindi word referring to a stopgap solution or using limited resources innovatively. Volunteers mobilized on WhatsApp, Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and any number of social media platforms to connect COVID-19 patients and their families somehow to some form of medical care. Civil society groups, non-profits, students, journalists, and lawyers

started fielding distress messages posted online. Informal coalitions formed based on hashtags like SOS City Name or hashtag COVID Emergency. Volunteers scrambled to procure drugs they knew little about and couldn't pronounce. Baricidinib, Toxelzumab. Lists were compiled of hospitals with available beds. Chemists who had remdesivir and plasma, hospitals admitting patients in the ICU.

Everyone I knew was glued to their phones. We will probably never know how many people survived because of stopgap efforts and people like Riddhi Dastadhar, who wrote the article I just quoted. These folks were heroes, but between 1.6 million and 4.2 million Indians are still likely to have died of COVID, most just this year. The official government count hovers at just over 400,000. And while mutual aid did save untold lives, the trauma of responding to such a calamity

on the fly has left permanent marks on Riddhi and their peers. Quote, we have tried to fill in the blank where the government's public health response should be, working ourselves to the bone and missing paid work opportunities. I know volunteers who have physically arranged ambulances and transported elderly patients who are alone. Many have been infected themselves or lost family, including my friend Sveta, whose grandfather passed away in November. In the last two weeks of April in Delhi,

volunteers barely slept or ate more than one meal a day. Nights were the worst, with the most critical cases arising after 10 p.m., when government officials tap out. There were instances where Sweta reached out to top state officials, who told her they would return in the morning. I have nightmares of hospitals and people crying. I remember passing out on the floor of my hall at 4 a.m. and waking up at 8 a.m. to the news that my patient had died, she says. I remember texting my friends to say, I need some time to cry. I want to cry. There is no time to cry. Like many volunteers, I've become alienated from my own body. I cry involuntarily before even realizing I'm sad. I wake up repeatedly throughout the night. I think of patients who died while I was trying to help, and my throat chokes up. Even now, I return to the moment I texted Megna, saying,

why isn't he breathing? Where is his cylinder? What are his oxygen levels? And she replied, my father is expired. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcast.

When disasters are singular, limited in scope, like that earthquake in Anchorage, mutual aid can be enough. People pull together and help each other, the calamity passes and life goes on. That is not the situation we find ourselves in today. Mutual aid alone is not enough because the central disaster

we face has no end point. There is no going back to normal because we now live in post-normal times. Post-normal is a term created by a British philosopher and an Argentinian mathematician in a paper about the new conditions of science in a time of increased turbulence and uncertainty. In that document I recommended, The Gonzo Futurist's Manifesto, the author quotes scholar Zayadin Sardar when he describes post-normal times as, Characterized by uncertainty, rapid change, realignment of power, upheaval and chaotic behavior, we live in an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to

be born, and very few things seem to make sense. A transitional age, a time without the confidence that we can return to any past we have known, and with no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable, or sustainable future. Post-normal times require post-normal solutions. This means moving beyond merely meeting needs and disasters and doing something bolder, building a new social safety net and a new society capable of anticipating need, preparing for disaster, and providing people with a way to get care and give care in a persistent manner. This is necessary because the only way to force our civilization back from the edge of

catastrophe is something very much like a revolution. Before you make assumptions, I want to be clear that I think dreams of violent overthrow of the government, red flags, and AK-47s and the like are foolish. They're useless too. You could perhaps lock the U.S. military into a long-term multi-sided insurgency, but such a fight would not resolve in any reasonable time frame and would cause the U.S. military, already Earth's number one carbon emitter, to pump even more poison into the atmosphere. The only thing that will work is the political equivalent of a heart attack, clogging the valves of capital with a united mass of human beings who demand concerted action, not just on the climate but on all the myriad injustices of our age. I'm talking about a general strike, and if you don't think one can

work, think about the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. It happened in 2019, if you can remember that far back, when President Trump refused to sign a budget that didn't include $5.7 billion in funding for his border wall. The shutdown dragged on for 35 days. It ended in large part because the American Association of Flight Attendants called for a general strike. Hours after union head Sarah Nelson announced that attendants were mobilizing to strike, which would have effectively grounded all U.S. air travel, President Trump agreed to reopen the government. Now what we actually need here is a true general strike, something that brings together tens of millions of workers across the country. That is a titanic

undertaking, an endeavor more ambitious and complex than the moon landing. To even make it possible, we will require national mutual aid infrastructure on a scale never before seen. Striking workers need food, power, medical care, eviction defense, and much more. The best rubric we have for how mutual aid on that scale might look comes from the island of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and for decades its people have languished as second-class citizens, forced to pay into the American project but excluded from many of its benefits. In 2016, the Obama administration placed a fiscal oversight board to manage the island's debt load.

This led to cuts to services that sparked a 2017 student strike against austerity and cuts to public education. Activists organized community kitchens for socialized food distribution. This had been a building trend in Puerto Rican organizing for a while. But in 2020, when Hurricane Maria hit, it reached unprecedented scale.

From a write-up by Issa Soto, quote, Disaster relief funds and supplies were slow to reach communities in need. Some people buried their dead in their backyards. Thousands left for the U.S. mainland. And a year after the hurricane, some people were still living without electrical service. It was evident. The state had collapsed. The protest signs that read, Only the people will save the people,

took on a new and raw meaning. If Puerto Ricans were to wait for the state, federal or local, to address the absolute devastation and lack of resources, many would die waiting. During that time, multiple organizations, mostly based on grassroots groups that existed prior to the hurricane, quickly organized to channel aid. Puerto Ricans have been abandoned by their so-called government for a very long time, and as a result, their mutual aid solutions are commensurately grander than anything we've seen in, say, Portland.

The network of community kitchens that formed after Maria had no head, no NGO or governor overseeing things. They eventually cooked more than 100,000 meals per day. An entire island was fed by its own people, coming together to keep each other alive, while the man who called himself their president hucked paper towels into a crowd. while the man who called himself their president hucked paper towels into a crowd. The example set by Puerto Rico gives us an idea, a glimpse of the scale of effort that will be needed to turn this shit around. It is a daunting task,

but this is thankfully a situation where we get to kill two birds with one stone. Because the thing that got us into this mess, the social atomization, selfishness, and greed that lies at the core of capitalism, has only one antidote. Taking care of each other. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.