Planning for Disaster: A Writing Exercise

What does it take to survive a crisis? What does it take to survive a crisis? Have you ever written a personal safety plan? Kelly Hayes offers some guidance on building solutions for the situation you’re in. TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Last week we talked about community safety and navigating our fears as Trump continues his lawless pursuit of authoritarian rule. I got a lot of follow up questions about the episode. So much so that I thought we should return to the subject this week. Some of you wanted to hear more about safety planning and that’s something I am going to dive into a bit more today. Because regardless of what happens on election day, there are a lot of potential catastrophes and crises looming, and people are on edge. Those potential climate disasters, mass evictions, waves of illness, and other threats, can make it hard to talk about the future, and the present, which can cause people to freeze up, personally and politically. So to get through a lot of the discussions we need to have, it seems like people need to talk a bit more about this, so let’s do that. Uncompromised, uncompromising news

Get reliable, independent news and commentary delivered to your inbox every day. When we are strategizing around safety, at the community level, there are questions we ask. I have done some of that strategy work around personal safety with people who were in danger for various reasons as individuals. So I am going to walk you through some questions, and I want you to formulate answers, and to write them down. Because while I don’t know your lives or priorities well enough to write your safety preparedness plan for you, you do, so let’s start building that right now.

So if we’re confronting our fears, our first question is, what is the crisis? Right? That may sound like a silly question, but it really isn’t, especially amid all of the chaos we’re experiencing. I think we have all had moments, lately and in general, when we couldn’t even articulate what we were specifically afraid of or upset about. Because what we are being battered with is a barrage of violence, indignity and atrocity. Sometimes, it all blurs together into a painful cacophony. So we need to disambiguate, and pull complete thoughts out of our messy responses to chaotic news cycles and right-wing onslaughts.

So assessing threats. What are the things you’re afraid pose a direct threat, or a potential direct threat, to your immediate well being, or to the well being over your family? We know that most of our fears are connected in various ways, but as flight attendants tell us, we are supposed to put on our own oxygen masks first. So what do those oxygen mask-grabbing moments look like for you?

So make a list of your most immediate concerns. Are you primarily worried […]

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