I am one of the luckiest people around. I get paid to do a job that I would (and did) do voluntarily. I get paid to change the future. My job is to work to get people to make tiny little changes in the decisions they make. Little decisions that can mean the difference between experiencing great horror or great adventure as the world and the laws of physics do what they do.
I am a disaster educator, a ’subject matter expert on emergency preparedness’ with the American Red Cross in Seattle. I am quite lucky to have that position, there aren’t many in the country, and there are a lot of very talented people that I work and interacti with in the field. On Thanksgiving I spent a lot of time thinking about just how lucky I have been. Of course, it is natural for people to feel lucky during stable periods of their life. That is distinctly unlucky for the disaster educator, the fact people are inclined to feel lucky makes our job so much harder.
The only thing certain in life is death, taxes and natural disasters, but people have only internalized the ‘death and taxes’ part, the majority of people are still in denial about disasters. This isn’t surprising. We are naturally inclined to expect the future is going to be OK, wouldn’t it be worse if we weren’t. This inclination is used by salespeople with great effect–somewhere deep down inside we know that our 7 year ARM mortgage loans won’t be affordable after the 7 years, but we buy the house anyway sure that something will work out by then. We can’t really afford the payments of our TV that will be starting in a year, after we put zero down–but a year is a long way away-something will work out. The credit lenders deep down inside knew that there would come the day when all of the payments came due at the same time–but they were sure that when it did, surely it wouldn’t be so bad.
One of the biggest difficulties in working to build resilience in a community through education is avoiding the urge to spend all the time talking with people who are already on board and counting that as success. In my experience, 90% of the people who reach out and request education already have done most of the work of getting ready. They already get it, being aware of the resources available to them, like free classes, is part of that process. The people who need the most help are the ones least interested in hearing about it.
We avoid thinking about disasters, but we do seek out others, crave and create connections, seek information. Connection, communication, searching out information–these are all critical for resilience.
Human nature puts barriers in the path of all of the safety gurus out there, but it also creates paths for those willing to look.
