Living through Beryl

My first real adult brush with weather disasters happened on April 27, 2011. I had decided to that the girls would skip school that day because tornados were predicited, if you know anything about tornados you know that they tend to ramp up around 2-4 in the afternoon, right about the time school gets out. We also lived in a trailer surrounded by trees so going to my parents’ house in town was always a safer option. This time it potentially saved our lives. As we watched the footage of the tornados ripping across the south the newcaster mentioned a first aid center was set up in the small area we lived in. I mentioned the damage must have been bad because they had never done that before, not five min later my neighbors called crying to make sure I was okay. Our home had been demolished. They’s had an F1 tornado go through our area, the result was three trees (one in each bedroom) of our home. This event changed how I saw the world. Within an hour of the tornado hitting people were out providing first aid, water, and clean up assistance. Men we did not know from my husband’s work came with totes to help us get as much of our belongings as we could. By the next day FEMA was on the ground with food, shower trucks, etc..

Disasters show me that the idea of community is still strong in a world that seems cold and selfish. People work together to provide not just assistance but also comfort. I saw a flicker of that this time. The first day after Beryl families were helping each other with cleanup, kids played in the streets, people grilled for the neighbors, they offered their homes for charging. However, it left just as quickly. I am not getting into the mishandling of everything or the politics that were being made off of the people ( maybe I will a little) but the community spirit. And I have to wonder if we are even a people that can have community anymore. Yes, there were the “Helpers” as Mr. Rogers called them. There was the local page moderator that spent what seemed like 24 hours a day for 8 days providing information to the people, filtering out hateful comments and directing people towards support, and there was the mother who got her power on quickly but decided to cook enough food to feed 200+ people for days. My sons’ best friends’ adults lent us their generator and allowed my son to stay at their home while we did not have power. There are others who delivered food and checked on neighbors but did so quietly and without self-promotion but there was a general lack of that sense of community, especially after power started coming on.

It seemed as if people just forgot about everything once their power came on. They were upset about the loss of food, lack of supplies etc., but they were no longer in the trenches. It took three to four days before food, water, and ice distribution started in our area, longer in other areas. Hurricanes are somewhat predicable, we have hurricane season, we have a good idea about the path. Why did it take so long for governments to get things in order? I did say maybe a little about politics. Why was the government so unprepared for boots on the ground action and why was there such a lack of transparency?

Disasters like this always affect lower socioeconomic areas hardest. I saw two replies repeatedly during this catastrophe, we did not have power for two weeks with Ike and You should have bought a generator. Helpful remarks, aren’t they? It costs a thousand (ish) dollars for a generator and forty dollars (depending on the type) a day to run it. People cannot afford their basic survival needs right now and someone thinks they can afford a generator. We could not even find gas without waiting hours in line for the first few days. We were very fortunate to be familiar with cooking over a fire with cast iron, so we were able to cook for our family and neighbors, but I don’t know what others their food once spoiled. I know some went to fast food restaurants that did not lose power, those lines were hours long as well which equates to more gas costs and gas usage when gas is hard to come by. It is expensive to be poor and unprepared.

 Yes, I agree people could and should be better prepared but how? How do you prepare to be without everything in 90+ deg temps for days when you have no money to prepare with?  I do not think anyone expected eight days. It is hard to be forgotten, and that’s what people felt like. It’s an election year so naturally events like hurricane disaster relief turned into political fodder but the bigger problem was that people were forgotten. That is why a sense of community during these crises is necessary. Politicians forget people are involved but neighbors see and experience the same thing. When power was restored, people went back to their lives and forgot their neighbors were still in the thick of it. The sense of community was lost, and people were forgotten not just by politicians but by their neighbors as well.

We survived Beryl. Our family is intact. We played countless rounds of rummy and learned to stock charcoal and towels. But this hurricane will go down in history and its toll remains to be seen. 

 One Woman’s thought on Harrison Butker

We have all heard various discourse on the speech made by Harrison Butker at the Benedictine College 2024 commencement in Atchison, Kansas. As a feminist and mother, I felt it was my duty to women to add my voice to that discourse. This week, twenty years ago, this week I gave birth to my first biological child. I knew the second she was placed in my arms that my life would never be the same. My husband and I had made the decision together that I should be a stay-at-home mother. My husband is a traditional Christian man, however his input into this decision was one supporting my decision. Before we got married, we discussed if I should stay home or not... I WANTED to stay at home and care for my children, but I also knew It was a privilege to stay at home, one that many others do not have. To be honest I had no desire for a career and the only thing I was trained for was being a childcare teacher. I wanted to be a SAHM.

I was a traditional wife, I cleaned house, I always had fresh baked cookies when the kids came home, made homemade bread, and dinner was almost always homemade. I enjoyed getting to be part of my children’s every day, but I was also bored, exhausted, and frustrated most of the time. Which is the feminine mystique; the assumption that we as women are fulfilled by being a paragon to motherhood, when we are not fulfilled, we wonder what we are doing wrong.

I volunteered at school, did the PTA, I helped at the church day care and senior programs (all with my kids of course). I tried not being so perfect, I tried being more perfect, I tried medication, nothing helped. This went on for almost fifteen years. When my youngest started school I looked around and realized I had nothing to do and was spending all day watching tv series. This is only so much a person could take so I decided to go back to school and get a degree just so I could get a job and not be bored. It turned out that going back to school was what I needed all along.

When I graduated college, it was different that the young ladies Harrison was addressing because I was not in my twenties envisioning my life. However, I do not think the women who I took classes with and cried over papers with were picturing all that time as just part of getting their M.R.S degree. I realize that Harrison is an outspoken Christian and many like him do believe that a Christian woman’s job is in the home, raising children and supporting their husbands. That a ring by spring and an M.R.S degree is just a precursor to a life inside the home. Harrison is privileged to make enough money for their family to live off of.

I feel like history, literature, and experience have shown us that women in general feel fulfilled when they have a balance in their life. Spending all day with children catering to their needs and those of your husbands is not balanced. We may feel blessed to have that opportunity, but it is normal to want something outside of that as well.

            When we live our lives in isolation surrounding ourselves with only our family or those who think like us, we as humans do not get a whole world view. This is in part where the danger lies both as a stay-at-home parent and as a Christian. We forget that there are other people in the world. Which is what the traditional values people want. Live in the world not of the world. But the real world is not the simplistic idealist place they have been isolated in.

            A meme went around right after Harrison Butker’s speech crediting him with saying “we should go back to a better time, like the 50’s & 60’s. When men were men, and women had more babies than thoughts” This was later proved as satirical post from thesportsmemery (Cercone). It might have been a satirical post, but a lot of Christians think this way. They truly believe that the 50’s & 60’s and the Regan administration were the greatest times to be alive, and for some elite few they might be right but not everyone was part of that elite few.

            This is why we need to have a whole view of the world and not one of isolation. If the 50’s &60’s where an amazing time for women Betty Friedan would not have written the Feminine Mystique and got women thinking about their lives giving birth to the third wave of Feminism. Even this movement though was isolated to upper class women who were able stay at home. The civil rights movement and the LGBTQ movement were also born in the 60’s. If anything, this so-called simpler time was a time of change and dissent.

            People were realizing their world views were born out of isolation and were opening their eyes to the greater world around them. I know this is going to seem controversial, but we need people like Harrison Butker to remind us that we have to broaden our word view. We have to remember that our work is not done.

            We have to lift suppressed voices. We have to teach that the standards of masculinity are harmful to men. We have to show we support one another. We have to be active in our communities. We need to be loud in our dissent but also know that there is a time to listen and learn. If we do not learn from other people, learn from history, then we are no better, only isolating ourselves in the voices we are trained to listen to.