MSNBC: “Texas may have warmed back up to its normal temperatures, but across the state, homes are still waterlogged, scant belongings beginning to molder. The flow of mutual aid hasn’t stopped, though; it keeps pace with need. Like the anarchist organizers who jury-rigged solar power grids for villages in Puerto Rico when the island’s electrical authority neglected them for nearly a year; like the community fridges across the country that have fed the unhoused and the needy since the pandemic’s beginning, as we approach its anniversary in the United States; Texans are finding alternative sources of power in the bonds between one another, in the state’s absence.
Texas may be an extreme case, with its decadeslong policies of deregulation and isolationism enabling a rickety, unweatherized power grid. But throughout the country, the very notion of interdependence, of common good, has eroded over decades of austerity, false scarcity and the cruel, parsimonious bureaucracy of means testing.
Nearly a year into the pandemic, a change in presidential administration has thus far largely meant a change in rhetoric from callousness and denial to a pageantry of candlelit mourning. The measures being considered on the federal level run contrary to the eagerness with which community members rush to help one another, offering open hands to the afflicted.
The process is slow and sclerotic, the direct aid impossibly inadequate, though the need is mounting, and despair mounts swiftly on despair. The nation’s reserves of cash seem to remain open only to the machinery of war. A state carved out from within like a hollow-point bullet delivers little but pain, and what is given is too little, and too slow. In the void, we rescue one another, knowing the survival of each rests on the survival of all.”