‘It remains suspended in its own mutation of an unlimited emergency since the men who play God decided to be friendlier to Chinese tourists and POGO players rather than be merciful to their hardworking paisanos.’
HAVING no gift of strategy, no arms, no secret weapon and no walled defense, I shall become a citizen of love, That little nation with the blood-stained sod, Where even the slain have power, the only country That sends forth an ambassador to God.” — Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, aka Jessica Powers, 1941 [https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2020/05/15/nuns-who-wrote-poems]
The Little Nation (size compared to its colonizer) in the tropical summer of 1941 should have been jolted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat 17: “The pressing problems that confront us are military and naval problems. We cannot afford to approach them from the point of view of wishful thinkers or sentimentalists. What we face is cold, hard fact.”
The contest among nations had already developed into a “world war for world domination” with the Chief Fascist “setting up puppet governments of its own choosing, wholly subject to the will and the policy of a conqueror.” Moreover: “The American laborer would have to compete with slave labor in the rest of the world. Minimum wages, maximum hours? Nonsense! Wages and hours would be fixed by Hitler…The farmer would face obvious disaster and complete regimentation.” [FDR, Address about the Proclamation of Unlimited National Emergency, Before the Governing Board of the Pan American Union and others, May 27, 1941]
Worse: “Yes, even our right of worship would be threatened. The Nazi world does not recognize any God except Hitler; for the Nazis are as ruthless as the Communists in the denial of God. What place has religion which preaches the dignity of the human being, the majesty of the human soul, in a world where moral standards are measured by treachery and bribery and fifth columnists?” [https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/may-27-1941-fireside-chat-17-unlimited-national-emergency]
Fast forward to the 21st century and that Little Nation is still in the deadly grip of SARS-CoV-2 (which Donald Trump had repeatedly branded as the “Wuhan Virus”). It remains suspended in its own mutation of an unlimited emergency since the men who play God decided to be friendlier to Chinese tourists and POGO players rather than be merciful to their hardworking paisanos. In this dystopia, one is sadly reminded of a stanza of Stanley Kunitz found in the May 1941 issue of “Poetry: A Magazine of Verse” that reads: “My surgeons are a savage band, Surely their patient is ill-fated. Their tricks are coarse: the small sweet hand.”
“Lastly they squeezed out of my veins, The bright liquor of sympathy” [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/issue/70661/may-1941]
In this pre-apocalyptic world, correct crisis and disaster risk management is imperative, not merely designating the Annex 1 building and the Nursing Clinics as the campus centralized isolation facilities. Some lessons: “Political judgments replace technical evaluations, however, after every disaster…This does not only lead to an inefficient and unjust distribution of resources, it also undermines and even discards the whole technical formal process of mitigation, discourages individual efforts of reducing the impact of hazards, and acts to encourage further negligent behaviour.” [Murat Balamir, “Painful Steps of Progress from Crisis Planning to Contingency Planning Changes for Disaster Preparedness in Turkey”]
Lesson 2. “Politically, it is exceedingly difficult in low-crisis societies to gain systematic attention for risks, vulnerabilities and threats…The successful safety record of the past, tends to foster assumptions that `these things cannot happen here’. Instead, political leaders and corporate managers place their faith in legal, technological and organizational devices designed to prevent accidents from happening and conflicts from escalating. They do not want to face the prospect that prevention may fail and that they could have a major emergency on their hands…The strategic challenge is to keep issues concerning crisis preparedness and crisis response on the political agenda and to achieve a better balance between the strategies of anticipation (prevention) and resilience (the ability to combat and overcome crises) in dealing with social and technological hazards and risks.” [Paul Hart, “Preparing Policy Makers for Crisis Management: The Role of Simulations,” Journal Of Contingencies And Crisis Management, Volume 5, Number 4, December 1997]
Lesson 3. Watch out when department “secretaries fail to shoulder with integrity the considerable legal and ethical responsibility they have under their ministers — if, for instance, they agree to act without appropriation or beyond legal authority; fail to administer with respect for due process or fair practice.” [Peter Shergold, “What Really Happens in the Australian Public Service: An Alternative View,” The Australian Journal of Public Administration, Vol. 66, No. 3, pp. 367—370]
Lesson 4. “Deeply ingrained habitual behaviors, like reporting the good news while hiding the bad, preventing people from speaking the truth, forbidding the public from understanding the true nature of events, and expressing a disdain for individual lives, have led to massive reprisals against our society, untold injuries against our people, and even terrible reprisals against those officials themselves…All this, in turn, led to the city of Wuhan’s falling under a 76-day quarantine, with its reverberations affecting untold numbers of people and places. It is absolutely essential that we continue to fight until those responsible are held accountable.” [Fang Fang. Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. English translation and Translator’s Afterword by Michael Berry. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2020]
Lesson 5. We need a backed-up save file for our entire civilization: “Kevin Kelly, a former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and founder of Wired magazine, has also suggested a ‘Forever Book’ or ‘Library of Utility’: a remote mountaintop vault of perhaps 10,000 books that collectively stores the essential knowledge required to re-create the infrastructure and technology of civilization.” — Lewis Dartnell [Jim Al-Khalili. What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveries and Reveal How Today’s Breakthroughs Are already Shaping Our World. NY: The Experiment, LLC, 2018]
Lesson 6. “Those who do work on these challenges today, and thus prepare themselves and their institutions for the new challenges, will be the leaders and dominate tomorrow. Those who wait until these challenges have indeed become ‘hot’ issues are likely to fall behind, perhaps never to recover.” [Peter F. Drucker. Management Challenges for the 21st Century. NY: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1999]
Lesson 7. “But why wait for an emergency?…If we have the will to survive and the will to achieve social efficiency, we cannot delay this task of spiritual regeneration.” [https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1938/08/19/address-of-president-manuel-l-quezon-on-policies-and-achievements-of-the-government-and-regeneration-of-the-filipino/]