![]() ![]() And the story of Deadwood, the mining camp in South Dakota where there existed no legal authority other than the one it made for itself, is perhaps the best example of how people can fail in a place where they shouldn’t, and how in their failure they can forfeit the community they built. The answers to these questions, no matter where they’re asked, form a story. What happens, then, when they choose wrong? Geographic forces and features inform the decisions of those who are endowed with the responsibility to make them, but those same forces and features can’t dictate what the decisions will be. Geography is fixed, more or less, but people are mutable, even mercurial. Not in their capacity to subjugate the lands they live on but in their competence to sustain the communities they build. Geopolitics may be the study of people in place, but what is so often ignored in the arrangement, but is just as often true, is the power of people. A dead body floats along the New Orleans waterfront.If you could create a community from scratch, knowing all that you know of what the land had to offer, understanding everything you understand about human nature, what would it look like? How would you create laws and rights in a place that has neither? How would you transact business? How would you instill in the community the value of the institutions that purport to serve it?Īnd if you decided to build these institutions, how would you maintain and promote them? To what extent would you rely on brute force as a necessary adjunct to their creation? Would you consider other means? Would the short-term benefits of your tactics outweigh the costs to your strategic interests? The coroner who examines him realizes something terrifying: this nameless man died sick. The corpse is infected with the pneumonic plague. The city authorities now have 48 hours to find and inoculate every person who came in contact with the man before his death or New Orleans will become the epicenter of a terrible epidemic. At a crisis meeting of the city council, one councilor argues that the only way to save the city is to announce to the public what has happened and seek their cooperation. But the local public health officer-the hero of this story-begs the mayor not to go public with the news. The citizens of New Orleans must be kept in the dark. ![]() The title of the film reveals what he fears will occur if the public discovers the truth: Panic in the Streets. The story beats charted out in the 1950 film Panic in the Streets have been repeated in every disaster film that has followed it. Experts discover a looming catastrophe of incredible proportions. They race to solve the problem as covertly as possible to do otherwise would invite a panic more disastrous than the disaster itself. If they fail, audiences get to see images of an unnerved public up close. Society descends into a Hobbesian scramble for resources or open riot against the powers that be. The lesson is clear: the key to disaster response is ensuring the public does not feel fear. ![]() Normal citizens who understand the danger they are in will pose a threat to everyone else in calamity’s path. Disaster management is thus, at its core, a problem of narrative control. This understanding of disaster is not limited to Hollywood blockbusters. Over the last year, we have seen the consequences of prioritizing panic prevention over disaster response in one country after another. The pattern was set early in Wuhan, China. There, provincial and municipal officials muzzled early warnings of a novel respiratory illness from doctors, virologists, and health officials. ![]() They feared what might happen if normal citizens became aware of the disease. “ they said we still can’t wear protective clothing, because it might stir up panic.” “When we first discovered it could be transmitted between people, our hospital head, chairman, medical affairs department, they sat and made endless calls to the city government, the health commission,” wrote one Wuhan nurse in January of 2020. Similar concerns prompted China’s National Health Commission to issue a confidential notice forbidding labs that had sequenced the new virus to publish their data without government authorization. Even as China’s top health official warned the Chinese health system to prepare for the “most severe challenge since SARS in 2003” and ordered the Chinese CDC to declare the highest emergency level possible, public-facing officials were still reporting that the likelihood of sustained transmission between humans was low. The Chinese continually stalled WHO teams trying to gather information on the pandemic it was not until the last week of January that Chinese health officials told the WHO the reason for their stonewalling. ![]()
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