Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 2: your weekly reminder that whenever there's bad stuff, there's good
Speaker 2: stuff people trying to do good despite the bad. I'm
Speaker 2: your house, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week's a little different.
Speaker 2: But you probably noticed because most people don't start with
Speaker 2: part two of something, But in case you do, this
Speaker 2: week is different because it's just me. This week, I'm
Speaker 2: talking about the mutual aid response to Hurricane Helen in
Speaker 2: western North Carolina. And I'm talking about that because I
Speaker 2: wanted to take a week off of researching history to
Speaker 2: go down and try to talk to people on the
Speaker 2: ground there and do whatever I could to help out
Speaker 2: because I live there for a very long time. The
Speaker 2: very first seed of this podcast was me in a
Speaker 2: barn outside of North Carolina trying to explain to my
Speaker 2: French friend why she should care about this one thing
Speaker 2: that happened in anarchist history a long time ago, and
Speaker 2: realizing that if I can convince her to care about it,
Speaker 2: then hopefully we can figure out how to talk talk
Speaker 2: about radical history and more interesting ways. And I was like,
Speaker 2: I should do a podcast, And here we are. Years later,
Speaker 2: I'm on two and a half years into this podcast
Speaker 2: that some of you all listen to, and I'm really grateful,
Speaker 2: but that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking
Speaker 2: about history unless you count last week as history, which
Speaker 2: you should because it's technically history. Where is it just
Speaker 2: the past? I was learning the difference between history and
Speaker 2: the past recently, but that's besides the point. And what
Speaker 2: you all can tell is that I just drank a
Speaker 2: bunch of sugar water. I thought it was just like
Speaker 2: electrolyte mix, but I had a bunch of sugar in it.
Speaker 2: And so I'm going to talk really fast, well or
Speaker 2: more excitedly anyway. This week is the special week yet
Speaker 2: still despite not being on Mike. Sophie is our producer
Speaker 2: Hi Sophie, and Rory is our audio engineer Hi Rory.
Speaker 2: And our theme music was written for us by on Woman.
Speaker 2: I'd say pie on Woman, but I have no idea.
Speaker 2: I think she listens to the show sometimes, but you know,
Speaker 2: she doesn't have to for a job like the other
Speaker 2: two people I mentioned. So where we last left the
Speaker 2: people doing mutual aid in Ashville, They were doing mutual
Speaker 2: aid in Nashville, and I had just shown up with
Speaker 2: a van and started talking to people. There were and
Speaker 2: probably still are two sort of informal economies running side
Speaker 2: by side right now in Asheville, North Carolina. Both come
Speaker 2: from a good place. There's a free economy and a
Speaker 2: cheap economy. Like there's like needs wants boards, for example,
Speaker 2: up on the outside of Firestorm, there's a big old
Speaker 2: chunk of cardboard and lots of markers around, and people
Speaker 2: are writing what they need and want, people where wellness
Speaker 2: checks need to get done, and what people have on
Speaker 2: offer and all those things right, And some people are
Speaker 2: writing down things like generator available for sale. It cost
Speaker 2: me six hundred, I'm willing to sell it for two
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty. Other people are donating generators. I've got
Speaker 2: a bias towards the latter, especially since I donated my
Speaker 2: own generator. But I also can't blame someone who wants
Speaker 2: to not fuck themselves financially, because the financial impacts of
Speaker 2: capitalism will probably in the end be worse for the
Speaker 2: community than the floodwaters themselves. Easier for me to donate
Speaker 2: an extra generator because I didn't live in the flood.
Speaker 2: There was a group of activists. I think they all
Speaker 2: met through school, not entirely certain who was gathering up
Speaker 2: all the donated gas cans they could, And they were
Speaker 2: just driving back and forth two runs a day, the
Speaker 2: three hour round trip to Shelby, North Carolina, to fill
Speaker 2: up on gas. Then they would come back. They would
Speaker 2: park across the street from Firestorm and fill up anyone's
Speaker 2: tank who needed it for free. They were prioritizing those
Speaker 2: driving around mutual aid supplies, but they weren't strict about that,
Speaker 2: and no one was like selfishly taking advantage of it.
Speaker 2: I actually saw no one get their entire gas tank filled,
Speaker 2: even though that was being offered anybody. While I was
Speaker 2: talking to them, a man walked up and asked if
Speaker 2: he could buy gas. So he's like, coming from the
Speaker 2: different economies, coming from the cash economy, that's kind of
Speaker 2: growing up too, oh right, And they told him he
Speaker 2: could have the gas for free. He asked if he
Speaker 2: could buy one of the gas cans. They told him
Speaker 2: that he could have the gas, but they needed the can.
Speaker 2: The man was not rude about this at all. He
Speaker 2: in the end, he only took the tiniest bit of gas,
Speaker 2: just enough to get himself to where he desperately needed
Speaker 2: to go and donated far more money than he would
Speaker 2: have paid if he'd bought the gas instead. Two folks
Speaker 2: from the south Side Community Farm showed up for a
Speaker 2: refill too, and I talked to them for a while.
Speaker 2: The black community in Asheville has been and this will
Speaker 2: not shock anyone to hear, both been historically mistreated and
Speaker 2: segregated away from the rest of the city and also
Speaker 2: among the hardest hit by the storm because the black
Speaker 2: community has been pushed out by gentrification over the decades
Speaker 2: into like sort of physically more dangerous areas, physically more
Speaker 2: disaster prone areas. The south Side Community Farm's motto on
Speaker 2: its website is growing Black food Sovereignty, and of course
Speaker 2: the farm itself was under risk of losing their farm
Speaker 2: plot even before the storm. For anyone wants to check
Speaker 2: them out there Southside Communitygarden dot org, and they seem
Speaker 2: worth supporting. In general, most of the city of Asheville
Speaker 2: is accessible. Most of the isolated communities that we talk
Speaker 2: about are the ones that have been cut off by
Speaker 2: the storm out in rural areas, but some of the
Speaker 2: black communities within Asheville were just as badly hit. Public
Speaker 2: transit has been disrupted, of course, and you know, these
Speaker 2: places are often further away from downtown and things, and
Speaker 2: also just physically more of the roads in and out
Speaker 2: of these neighborhoods have been rendered inaccessible. Most of the
Speaker 2: supplies are coming into downtown Asheville or West Asheville. I
Speaker 2: mostly hung out near Haywood Street in West Ashville because
Speaker 2: that's mostly where I hung out when I lived there.
Speaker 2: One of the main tasks in front of mutual laid
Speaker 2: workers that they're working on. It's not perfect, they're working
Speaker 2: on it. It's distributing supplies out from these central locations
Speaker 2: to the harder to access places or the places that
Speaker 2: are more likely to be forgotten. The response from businesses
Speaker 2: has been well mixed. Already infamous is that six employees
Speaker 2: of Impact Plastics in Tennessee died after being told that
Speaker 2: if they didn't report to work in the storm, they
Speaker 2: would be fired. Rumors on the ground in Asheville, which
Speaker 2: I haven't been able to confirm yet, include things like
Speaker 2: one neighbor I talked to said some delivery drivers for
Speaker 2: Ingles were told that they had to drive that day
Speaker 2: and they died, or that Ingles, which is a large
Speaker 2: grocery store chain in the area refused to give the
Speaker 2: food away that was going to be lost when the
Speaker 2: power went out from like their fridges and freezers and shit,
Speaker 2: there's not a lot of ingles love going on, is
Speaker 2: what I'm getting at from multiple different groups that I
Speaker 2: talked to. Meanwhile, I waited alongside about ten or fifteen
Speaker 2: other vehicles behind in Aldis, which is another large chain
Speaker 2: grocery store, while employees brought us palette after palette of
Speaker 2: produce and other goods that were going to go bad.
Speaker 2: We loaded up our vehicles and drove out to the
Speaker 2: various distribution centers where other drivers were to take the
Speaker 2: produce the last mile. I recruited one of my best
Speaker 2: friends to basically become my handler while I was there.
Speaker 2: They've been doing relief work with Mutual ad disaster relief
Speaker 2: for years, and we drove around the city and the
Speaker 2: surrounding areas, dropping stuff off and talking to folks, and honestly,
Speaker 2: even above driving stuff around, I think that one of
Speaker 2: the main things that I've been able to do is
Speaker 2: literally just connect people because of my public presence. It'll
Speaker 2: be like people on Twitter, you know, messaging me, or
Speaker 2: I guess adding me. I don't have my dms open
Speaker 2: on Twitter because that was a nightmare because I'm trans
Speaker 2: but you know, messaging me and letting me know what
Speaker 2: they have to offer, what they need, and trying to
Speaker 2: get that in touch with people. And that's also what
Speaker 2: my friend on the ground was doing. You know. That's
Speaker 2: also so much of the work as we're driving around
Speaker 2: delivering these supplies. Some of it is delivering supplies and
Speaker 2: a lot of it is just talking to people. A
Speaker 2: lot of it is saying like, what's going on here? Right?
Speaker 2: Because these informal networks without central command, that's how they work,
Speaker 2: and they work really well. And wherever we went, there
Speaker 2: were people ready to help load or unload the vehicle,
Speaker 2: and there were folks happy to talk, folks happy to
Speaker 2: meet my poor overstimulated dog. It's currently quite happily napping
Speaker 2: at my feet. I don't normally sug just bringing dogs
Speaker 2: into these crises. I just live alone, and also was
Speaker 2: set up to be self sufficient, and so I had
Speaker 2: no other choice. And that friend of mine who was
Speaker 2: driving around with was excited for the canned water. It's
Speaker 2: apparently a thing in disaster relief circles. This like canned water.
Speaker 2: This is unlabeled water. And beer cans, and it's water
Speaker 2: that tastes a little beery. It doesn't have beer in it,
Speaker 2: but it's like water that is perfectly potable, but is
Speaker 2: like part of the process of making stuff. As my
Speaker 2: friend explained it, breweries have an awful lot of distilled
Speaker 2: water around in their tanks for the beer making process,
Speaker 2: and when supplies are needed, they can just can up
Speaker 2: that water and drop it off at mutual aid hubs.
Speaker 2: The best breweries I don't put their name or logo
Speaker 2: on the cans when they do it because they're not
Speaker 2: doing it for clout. They're doing it to help people.
Speaker 2: So ironically, I don't actually know who directly to thank
Speaker 2: for the canned water that I drink. I'm guessing it
Speaker 2: was from Pisca Brewery, but if it was someone else,
Speaker 2: you're cool too. It was an interesting echo of when
Speaker 2: only a few years ago in twenty twenty, when I
Speaker 2: was living in Asheville, the distilleries turned their equipment to
Speaker 2: make hand sanitizer to give it away. The small business
Speaker 2: community in Asheville was out in force for relief. Restaurant
Speaker 2: after restaurant was providing hot meals. Some places sold things
Speaker 2: as cheap as they could without losing their shirts, you know,
Speaker 2: like a quarter of their price or whatever. Other places
Speaker 2: just accepted that they were going to lose their shirts
Speaker 2: and gave everything away. At one point, I was waiting
Speaker 2: outside my friend's house while the van was loaded with supplies.
Speaker 2: Asheville is a strange place geographically, class wise, just just
Speaker 2: an interesting place. There are all these streets where kind
Speaker 2: of regular old vinyl sighted houses that have been around
Speaker 2: since at least the eighties or nineties or whatever are
Speaker 2: right next to these cube shaped modern houses. And these
Speaker 2: cube shaped modern houses are often built on stilts because
Speaker 2: they're built in the wash where there's not actually land
Speaker 2: right or it's just a direct, crazy steep angle, so
Speaker 2: they're built on stilts. And these houses seem to me,
Speaker 2: and I could be absolutely wrong, they seem bougier to me.
Speaker 2: I don't know if they are, but my friend calls
Speaker 2: them Frank Lloyd wrong because they're kind of ugly. And
Speaker 2: I'm not even like anti modernist stuff. I just honestly,
Speaker 2: if I didn't think they were like a weird, gentrifying thing,
Speaker 2: I might not think they were ugly. I don't know.
Speaker 2: The class is complicated, but the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses
Speaker 2: are around, and my friends live on a street like
Speaker 2: that where there's, you know, some of the older houses
Speaker 2: that are on land. And then Frank Loyd Wrongs on
Speaker 2: stilts and a hatchback stopped in the middle of the
Speaker 2: street where we were hanging out in the front yard.
Speaker 2: A man got out and shouted water, and it took
Speaker 2: us a while to sort out his meaning. He was
Speaker 2: making sure we had enough water. He then asked about
Speaker 2: each of the other houses in turn and didn't leave
Speaker 2: until he'd satisfied himself that everyone had water, and he
Speaker 2: introduced himself. He was actually a neighbor. He lived in
Speaker 2: one of the cube houses on stilts. He didn't want
Speaker 2: to approach us and come hang out and be friendly.
Speaker 2: But I don't really blame him. We're a bunch of
Speaker 2: subcultural folks wearing all black, and many of the people
Speaker 2: I was hanging out with were the neighbors he'd never
Speaker 2: actually met since he'd moved into the neighborhood. I would
Speaker 2: be nervous if I was him too, And this interaction
Speaker 2: stands out in my mind as a really positive one.
Speaker 2: I ought to be really clear, this man did nothing wrong.
Speaker 2: This man is amazing I like him, pro this man.
Speaker 2: This interaction stands out in my mind because we don't
Speaker 2: actually have to like each other to help each other out,
Speaker 2: you know. Elsewhere, of course, I saw subcultural lines break
Speaker 2: down fast at another friend's house. I talked for about
Speaker 2: a half an hour with a seventy year old couple
Speaker 2: who lived behind that house, like in a different house,
Speaker 2: who are grateful that one of the watercubes from my
Speaker 2: basement in West Virginia had wound up on their porch
Speaker 2: because my friend knew they might need it. We talked
Speaker 2: about the dry toilet situation, and they explained that growing
Speaker 2: up around there, their own parents and our grandparents have
Speaker 2: been used to outhouses anyway. And that's why we're proud
Speaker 2: to announce our newest sponsor, shitting in a bucket. That's right.
Speaker 2: If you're listening to this, feel free to try shitting
Speaker 2: in a bucket. Uh. But you gotta do it like
Speaker 2: the right way. You got to use saw dust. You
Speaker 2: got to either compost it real good or throw it away. Honestly,
Speaker 2: it's like you need more information than is available in
Speaker 2: this ad for shitting in a bucket. Here's some other.
Speaker 3: Ads, and we're back and we're talking about toilets.
Speaker 2: That's what everyone listens to podcasts to hear about. They've
Speaker 2: all want to hear about poop. There are a lot
Speaker 2: of problems when the water goes out in the city,
Speaker 2: most notably, of course, the fact that you need to
Speaker 2: drink water in order to be alive. But we also
Speaker 2: use water, an awful lot of water to flush our toilets.
Speaker 2: The folks from Southside Community Farm had been going door
Speaker 2: to door teaching people how to bucket flush, where you
Speaker 2: dump water directly into the bowl of the toilet to
Speaker 2: force it to flush, and you can use non podable
Speaker 2: water to do it. That's like the upside to the
Speaker 2: fact that it takes a ton of water. One friend
Speaker 2: of mine, while the storm was still going on, ran
Speaker 2: around the house and cut all the down spout gutters
Speaker 2: or the down spout spouts, I don't know if they're
Speaker 2: still called gutters when they're the down spouts whatever, and
Speaker 2: set up trash cans underneath them all which left their
Speaker 2: house with hundreds of gallons of toilet flush water. That
Speaker 2: has saved their asses. If you'll part in the pun.
Speaker 2: I talked with a woman named Lark from the band
Speaker 2: Holler and Crow, who was set up outside Firestorm teaching
Speaker 2: people how to make and use dry toilets. And you'll
Speaker 2: notice this is like one of the only names I've used,
Speaker 2: and that's because I've mostly been leaving everyone's names out
Speaker 2: of my writing, because that's like a default in the
Speaker 2: activist circles that I'm part of. And I'm still readjusting
Speaker 2: to journalism times because I mostly forgot to ask people
Speaker 2: if they wanted their names on the record or not.
Speaker 2: There's a funny tension here because a lot of activists
Speaker 2: specifically don't want to be mentioned by name, but a
Speaker 2: lot of people, for good reason, are looking for recognition
Speaker 2: for the work that they're doing and don't want to
Speaker 2: be left out of the story, especially groups and individuals
Speaker 2: were traditionally left out of stories. I'm from an activist background,
Speaker 2: so I default to not naming people. For anyone who's
Speaker 2: work I've left uncredited, I'm quite sorry. So Lark has
Speaker 2: set up outside Firestorm with a few dry toilets. These
Speaker 2: are five gallon buckets with pipe insulation for a seat
Speaker 2: and sawdust at the bottom. Normally you'd use these as
Speaker 2: composting toilets, but for emergency use you just use trash
Speaker 2: bags to collect the poop. The idea is that you
Speaker 2: don't pee into them, You just poop, and then you
Speaker 2: cover the poop with sawdust. You pee outside. In most
Speaker 2: of these situations it sounds sort of gross, but honestly,
Speaker 2: shitting in a bucket it's not too bad at all.
Speaker 2: This was my primary toilet for years when I lived
Speaker 2: off grid and done right. They actually don't really smell.
Speaker 2: You have to cover them. But Lark printed up instructions
Speaker 2: in English and Spanish to distribute. She figured she'd pass
Speaker 2: out maybe four or so of these toilets. When I
Speaker 2: talked to her two hours in, she'd given away around twenty,
Speaker 2: which was more than she'd brought with her. Because people
Speaker 2: had seen what she was doing and thought I can
Speaker 2: help with that, and they brought her buckets and pipe insulation.
Speaker 2: One man who owned a sawmill had already been driving
Speaker 2: around town with trash bags full of sawdust, thinking I
Speaker 2: bet someone needs these for composting toilets.
Speaker 1: He was right.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, in the parking lot behind Firestorm, two groups, the
Speaker 2: Asheville Tool Library and Western North Carolina Repair Cafe, had
Speaker 2: teamed up to fix generators and chainsaws every time they
Speaker 2: got one running, people would cheer, and then it would
Speaker 2: go out into the field where the generators could keep
Speaker 2: refrigerators full of meds cold, and the chainsaws could free
Speaker 2: people trapped by down trees. And there's like three or
Speaker 2: four mechanics working at any given point on these different ones.
Speaker 2: You know. I brought my own backup generator down, the
Speaker 2: one I'd used when I'd lived in a cabin and
Speaker 2: the winter days had been too short for my solar array.
Speaker 2: I hadn't run it in three years, and Okay, I
Speaker 2: sort of hate small engines. They're so fussy and I
Speaker 2: don't understand them. And I was like, oh, I left
Speaker 2: this for three years. It probably doesn't work anymore. I
Speaker 2: don't know. It's a weird thing to say you hate
Speaker 2: small engines. But in my personal life, I tend to
Speaker 2: run solar generators as my first backup choice, and I
Speaker 2: use an electric chainsaw because I'm only taking down the
Speaker 2: occasional tree, not doing like arborist work day in and
Speaker 2: day out, things that need oil changes and use chokes
Speaker 2: and rip chords. They're finicky and confusing and they scare me.
Speaker 2: So I had literally no idea. I had no idea
Speaker 2: whether my generator worked, and I actually thought it was
Speaker 2: sort of like a dick move to bring down a
Speaker 2: generator without bringing everything it needed to be immediately put
Speaker 2: into the field. And in a lot of situations that
Speaker 2: would be true. Right if there was like only one
Speaker 2: group doing this work and you show up and like
Speaker 2: I brought you a broken thing, that's like not great, right,
Speaker 2: But I had forgotten. Ashville is full of people. People
Speaker 2: are resourceful. Also, it turns out my generator was fine.
Speaker 2: They just put gas in it and it ran, So
Speaker 2: I guess that's good. Watching people do what they were
Speaker 2: good at in the service of saving lives was sort
Speaker 2: of magical. All of everything I saw was magical, to
Speaker 2: be clear, Maybe the repair station wasn't even like extra magical,
Speaker 2: But I just I love a world in which there
Speaker 2: are people who like fixing things and who will fix
Speaker 2: things because there's things that need fixing, and that is
Speaker 2: the world we live in. I love the world we
Speaker 2: live in. I did a supply run drop to the
Speaker 2: Asheville Tool Library itself, which is just outside of town. Well,
Speaker 2: I guess it's technically within the city limits, but it's
Speaker 2: like rural area greenhouse land because They were collecting bar
Speaker 2: and chain oil there and also tarps and ppe and
Speaker 2: I had a bunch of that stuff and it's gonna
Speaker 2: be one hell of a long cleanup. I talked to
Speaker 2: the sculptor there who was sorting gear and getting it
Speaker 2: ready to go out with the various crews. We also
Speaker 2: drove up to Marshall, which is a smaller town about
Speaker 2: thirty minutes north of the city. There we saw what
Speaker 2: we'd been seeing everywhere, named groups using their infrastructure and
Speaker 2: then melting into one another. The Harm Reduction group up there,
Speaker 2: which distributes safe use supplies to the rural community, teamed
Speaker 2: up with a group called ROAR, which stands for Rural
Speaker 2: Organizing and Resilience and this is a rural mutual aid organization.
Speaker 2: Their storefront, the Harm Reduction storefront, was now a relief center.
Speaker 2: They talked to their landlord at the Strip Mall, who
Speaker 2: I believe for free opened up another one of the
Speaker 2: empty storefronts for them to expand into. Because Marshall became
Speaker 2: a node reaching out further into the county. A group
Speaker 2: of rural punks unloaded supplies from the van, a lot
Speaker 2: of diapers and wet wipes and stuff like that, if
Speaker 2: I remember correctly, and we hung out for a while
Speaker 2: so that Rentraw my dog could run around and not
Speaker 2: be over stimulated by the people on the cars of
Speaker 2: the city. Several families came in to gather what they
Speaker 2: needed and take it out to people while we were there,
Speaker 2: and a pickup truck full of donations arrived and it
Speaker 2: was unloaded and sorted. One of my friends from RORA
Speaker 2: was there, and I've known him almost twenty years. I've
Speaker 2: been working with him on anarchist projects off and on
Speaker 2: the whole time he was busy, but we talked briefly
Speaker 2: about how well it's just fucking cool to realize that
Speaker 2: so many of us from the early aughts are still here,
Speaker 2: still doing things, still trying to make the world better
Speaker 2: however the fuck we can. And for him it's organizing
Speaker 2: his rural community. And I don't have a clever AD transition.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. I know that's usually the thing I'm best at,
Speaker 2: but I don't have one. I just have a regular
Speaker 2: AD transition, which is where talking gets interrupted by ads.
Speaker 2: Now and we're back. I remember talking to someone from
Speaker 2: RH few years back about their work. One of the
Speaker 2: main things that they do normally is that they get
Speaker 2: firewood to people who heat their homes with wood and
Speaker 2: don't have the resources or often the physical strength anymore
Speaker 2: to go pick it up themselves. Rural communities do tend
Speaker 2: to be older than city communities, and one thing that
Speaker 2: Roor noticed is that it wasn't just progressives and activists
Speaker 2: and stuff who were down to help out. A man
Speaker 2: with a pickup truck and a trailer wants to be useful,
Speaker 2: whether he voted blue or red or refuses to vote
Speaker 2: at all. And I'm not trying to like say me samey.
Speaker 2: I understand that there's like serious political divisions and that
Speaker 2: those do impact our lives. I'm a trans woman living
Speaker 2: in a rural area. I'm very aware of this, but
Speaker 2: there's still the desire to be useful. I think about
Speaker 2: the pickup truck a lot. It's not my Roman empire.
Speaker 2: I probably only think about it like once every couple
Speaker 2: of months, but I think real deeply about pickup trucks.
Speaker 2: When I do, I mean I also think about the
Speaker 2: because I drive one. From the outside, sometimes people see
Speaker 2: and sometimes from the you know, lots of people, including
Speaker 2: pickup truck drivers, see them as sort of these big
Speaker 2: phallic symbols of exaggerated masculinity. But I remember one time
Speaker 2: someone asked me what non toxic masculinity looked like to me,
Speaker 2: and I actually wound up thinking about some of the
Speaker 2: people I know and their trucks. People drive trucks because
Speaker 2: they're symbols of self reliance, and even more so because
Speaker 2: they believe that they can be useful if they have
Speaker 2: tools to be useful with. Someone carrying a recovery strap
Speaker 2: in their pickup truck isn't carrying it for themselves. They're
Speaker 2: carrying it so that they can tow a car out
Speaker 2: of a ditch, so that they can be useful. We
Speaker 2: talk all the time on this show, especially recently since
Speaker 2: the last week's episodes were about it. In this week's
Speaker 2: episodes about it, we talk all the time about disaster compassion.
Speaker 2: And when you talk about disaster compassion, people often say, yeah,
Speaker 2: but that can't last past the disaster. It could. How
Speaker 2: do I know that? Because RAR knows that people will
Speaker 2: donate their time with their pickup trucks to haul wood
Speaker 2: for their neighbors, because people will pull people out of ditches,
Speaker 2: because we're fucking hardwired to help anyway. Pickup truck tangent Aside,
Speaker 2: the people in Marshall itself ironically got power, were stored sooner,
Speaker 2: and since so many of the people there are on wells,
Speaker 2: they have more reliable access to water. While we were there,
Speaker 2: they were discussing how to get water relief into the city,
Speaker 2: mutual aid being famously mutual. Unfortunately, since I left last
Speaker 2: Thursday morning, it's come out that the level of toxins
Speaker 2: in the water downstream, which is north of Ashville, the
Speaker 2: level of toxins is terrifyingly high due to plastic chemical spills,
Speaker 2: and people in Marshall are likely to be going through
Speaker 2: something an awful lot worse than initially expected. This is
Speaker 2: still in the rumor stage as I record this, but
Speaker 2: I'm hearing about relief workers with rat and worse and
Speaker 2: serious ppe is needed in the area. Another sort of
Speaker 2: rumor has been floating around since the start of the crisis,
Speaker 2: rumors that hopefully will know more about soon, Rumors of
Speaker 2: law enforcement interfering with relief efforts. I expect I'll be
Speaker 2: returning to this subject as I understand more about it.
Speaker 2: But to be clear, the government is not a monolithic entity. Local, state,
Speaker 2: and federal are all different. There are different departments within
Speaker 2: each of those, and each department is staffed by people
Speaker 2: who are famously different from one another. There has absolutely
Speaker 2: been a lot that various government agencies have been doing
Speaker 2: that is useful. There are radio broadcasts of information that
Speaker 2: have been going out constantly. There are places for people
Speaker 2: to fill their own water containers. The government is set
Speaker 2: up a refugee camp essentially. I've heard FEMA, which actually
Speaker 2: in the end is more of an insurance company than
Speaker 2: an actual disaster response organization, is working to get people
Speaker 2: some monetary relief, although I understand why. We also people
Speaker 2: are very madahema about all of that because there's an
Speaker 2: enormous meta red tape and it sounds like the whole
Speaker 2: thing isn't going to be as funded as is expected.
Speaker 2: And again, this is not a current events podcast, and
Speaker 2: that's stuff that's coming out now. Fire stations are collecting
Speaker 2: and distributing gear. Official city workers are often handling the
Speaker 2: most dangerous chainsaw tasks, like specifically chainsawing the trees entangled
Speaker 2: with power lines, and the lines between official and informal
Speaker 2: relief are often blurred. And we can and should be
Speaker 2: friends whenever possible. A mutual aid disaster really friend of
Speaker 2: mine made coffee for the chainsaw crew on their street
Speaker 2: working at night to yeah clear a tree tangled up
Speaker 2: in power lines. People from various organizations are sharing supplies
Speaker 2: with one another wherever it's necessary, including going from government
Speaker 2: to informal or formal NGO to informal or vice versa.
Speaker 2: You know, the emergency declaration that allows doctors to be
Speaker 2: doctors in informal settings, or allows pharmacies to refoe prescriptions
Speaker 2: without prescription forms are life saving things that the government
Speaker 2: is sort of doing now. Granted they're kind of like,
Speaker 2: is not enforcing a thing really count as doing a thing?
Speaker 2: I don't know whatever. While I was there, though, there
Speaker 2: were constant rumors about roadblocks being set up by the
Speaker 2: government to prevent resources from going where they needed to go,
Speaker 2: or attempting to requisition disaster supplies and to centralized official locations,
Speaker 2: which are famously really bad at getting things out that
Speaker 2: last mile and figuring out where things actually need to go.
Speaker 2: On the condition of anonymity, I spoke with a female
Speaker 2: worker about this. They told me, in essence that while
Speaker 2: a lot of the long term disaster relief staff come
Speaker 2: from community organizing backgrounds a greater percentage of the immediate
Speaker 2: disaster response. People who are interested in the shorter deployments
Speaker 2: are like military and law enforcement types who struggle to
Speaker 2: see something seemingly structuralist and have an intense desire to
Speaker 2: impose structure upon it, which is to say, to move
Speaker 2: into sort of an enforcement mode. Some of the rumors
Speaker 2: of roadblocks have proven to be exaggerated, but not all
Speaker 2: of them. I can point to three things like that
Speaker 2: that I have more information about right now, and again
Speaker 2: I suspect we'll know more by the time you're listening
Speaker 2: to this. That's why I normally stick with history. Hell,
Speaker 2: that's why I used to start with only doing history
Speaker 2: of where no one in the story is alive anymore.
Speaker 2: But eventually I moved into the more recent history. Here
Speaker 2: we are, what's next? Am I going to do future episodes?
Speaker 2: Who knows? Okay, the stories that I know a little
Speaker 2: bit more about. I know that cops pulled over a
Speaker 2: vehicle headed into one small town earlier in the week
Speaker 2: to tell them that the town was closed to traffic.
Speaker 2: When the people in the car explained that it was
Speaker 2: full of diapers and other supplies, the cop let them through.
Speaker 2: That's the nicest interaction I know of like that. Another
Speaker 2: well publicized cases of a helicopter pilot who went to
Speaker 2: go rescue people and was told he'd be arrested if
Speaker 2: he flew into the area again. I've heard rumors on
Speaker 2: the ground that other pilots have been welcomed with open
Speaker 2: arms by local officials and they've promised a clear airspace
Speaker 2: for them. I've also heard from a tractor trailer of
Speaker 2: supplies that was pulled over on the interstate and the
Speaker 2: cops essentially said, you can either turn around or let
Speaker 2: us take all that stuff to our distribution center, and
Speaker 2: the tractor trailer turned around. I'm assuming they found another
Speaker 2: route in cops are famous for highway robbery. Of course,
Speaker 2: it's called civil asset forfeiture, so it doesn't surprise me
Speaker 2: at all. There are also rumors of regular highway robbery,
Speaker 2: and some of these seem to be corroborated. It seems
Speaker 2: very likely that a tractor trailer full of supplies on forty,
Speaker 2: where they were sleeping in their truck, as people and
Speaker 2: trucks often do, was robbed at gunpoint, and people took
Speaker 2: all of the supplies that fit into their car. That
Speaker 2: is the only corroborated thing like that I've personally seen.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of rumors going around about wild
Speaker 2: looting and things like that, And first of all, I
Speaker 2: don't have a problem with people breaking into stores to
Speaker 2: take what they need when it's that or starve. That
Speaker 2: doesn't bother me at all, especially if people then redistribute
Speaker 2: those things where they need to go. I love living
Speaker 2: in a society where we all love robin hood and
Speaker 2: yet pretend like looting and disaster situations is wrong. I mean,
Speaker 2: even in disaster movies the heroes do it. What's wrong
Speaker 2: with you people? Anyway, It's still not nice to rob
Speaker 2: people at gunpoint for the supplies that they're driving into
Speaker 2: the city. But these rumors of looting, it's possible that
Speaker 2: a couple people looted or were arrested looting, they seem
Speaker 2: to be greatly exaggerated. Even again, I'm hearing this on hearsay,
Speaker 2: but even the local law enforcement when sort of asked
Speaker 2: about it, were like, Nah, that's just like not really happening.
Speaker 2: That's like more of like the Facebook madness that happens
Speaker 2: where people are posting like Ashville's gone into crazy mode.
Speaker 2: The purple hair freaks are killing everyone, and there's all
Speaker 2: these rumors about people burning their houses down while they're gone,
Speaker 2: and just fucking bullshit. It's just all fucking bullshit. That's
Speaker 2: besides the point where were we It's possible, even likely
Speaker 2: that official channels will slowly get their shit together and
Speaker 2: start essentially trying to strong arm the competition out of
Speaker 2: the business of helping people. One small town restaurant posted
Speaker 2: a Facebook that it was told to shut down its
Speaker 2: free distribution center to get back to the business of
Speaker 2: selling things in order to bolster the local economy and
Speaker 2: let the cops handle the relief work. And that's the
Speaker 2: whole twisted end of it, isn't it. We actually genuinely
Speaker 2: could build a society based on mutual aid and solidarity.
Speaker 2: Many such societies have existed throughout history, and they pop
Speaker 2: up naturally every single time something goes wrong. It's what
Speaker 2: we want to do. And what's funny is they don't
Speaker 2: look good on paper, they look good in person. There
Speaker 2: was a carnival air to Asheville while I was there,
Speaker 2: which is a bit tragic and strange, and some people
Speaker 2: feel intensely alienated by that Carnival air especially the people
Speaker 2: who are suffering, or are isolated, or just lost loved ones,
Speaker 2: or have no fucking clue how they're going to pay
Speaker 2: their rent now that their job is closed indefinitely. But
Speaker 2: still there are a lot of smiles on a lot
Speaker 2: of people's faces, because giving each other things feels good.
Speaker 2: That's the core of it. That's the lesson I learned
Speaker 2: from Rebecca Soulnett by way of all my friends who've
Speaker 2: read her books. That's the lesson I've learned from the
Speaker 2: random Soviet era beggar by way of a strange biography.
Speaker 2: We feel good when we help each other. We can
Speaker 2: help each other more, but the state and capitalism wants
Speaker 2: us to get back to the business of selling things,
Speaker 2: back to paying rent, and back to waiting around to
Speaker 2: die in the next disaster. I don't want to paint
Speaker 2: a rosy picture. I didn't go toward the devastation. I
Speaker 2: didn't work with a chainsaw crew or an ATV crew
Speaker 2: to get supplies into the worst areas on our signal loops.
Speaker 2: There are constant messages of worry and fear, and the
Speaker 2: need is intense and ongoing. People need help. If you're
Speaker 2: in western North Carolina, make sure you have what you
Speaker 2: need personally, and then go see about helping others. If
Speaker 2: you're within a day's driver or so, there might be
Speaker 2: hubs being set up to collect supplies to get them
Speaker 2: to Ashville. Work with a supply hub rather than assuming
Speaker 2: the best thing to do is go beyond the ground.
Speaker 2: Asheville doesn't lack people at lacks supplies. Help move supplies
Speaker 2: towards Asheville wherever you are, but also look into what's
Speaker 2: needed instead of just sending old sweaters or whatever. If
Speaker 2: you do expect to go into Ashville bringing supplies, do
Speaker 2: so connected with a group and expect to be self sufficient.
Speaker 2: If you're coming for a day, make sure you have
Speaker 2: five days of food and water with you. But for
Speaker 2: most people, the best way to help is to donate.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of groups worth donating to, too
Speaker 2: many to easily collate here, and the needs EBB and flow,
Speaker 2: and who knows when you're listening to this, So I'll
Speaker 2: say two groups that I've either donated to or worked with,
Speaker 2: and they are Asheville Medical Solidarity and Mutual Aid Dissease
Speaker 2: US for Relief. Donate to them. Thank you for listening
Speaker 2: to this extra strange episode of Cool People Who Did
Speaker 2: Cool Stuff. Thank you listeners for providing me a job
Speaker 2: that's flexible enough that I was able to take a
Speaker 2: week off to go help my friends. And thanks for
Speaker 2: taking care of each other. Oh, and if there's a
Speaker 2: second lesson here, Store a week's worth of water and
Speaker 2: food in your house, keep at least half a tank
Speaker 2: of gas in your car at all times, and go
Speaker 2: introduce yourself to your neighbors.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. A more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
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Speaker 1: your podcasts.