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I've had several friends and family members ask me what it's like being an emergency manager coordinating response operations to COVID-19. It's a surprisingly complicated question. While I can't speak for the rest of my #EMGTwitter colleagues, this is what it feels like for me:
It's like watching the ocean recede after a big earthquake, drawing way way out, back to the horizon, leaving the creatures behind vulnerable and unprotected. You know the tsunami that follows the quake is coming, as it always does, this pattern is as old as the planet itself.
You know the science by heart, the projections and models are dire. You don't have much time and every minute counts. Unfortunately, you can't run, you can't even move. You're stuck in place, as are your friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates, nearly every human on Earth.
So you brace yourself, you tell others to dig in, first gently then louder, your insistence growing with each precious moment. You link arms with strangers, in the hopes that you can collectively lessen who slips away, your fate and the future of all that you love in their hands.
It's a confusing blend of emotions experienced simultaneously; frustration, anger, gratitude, compassion, camaraderie, forboding, exhaustion, love, and hope. I am simultaneously grieving for the future we all lost just weeks ago, while fighting like hell against what comes next.
As an Existentialist, I believe that chaos is the natural state of existence, that the universe is inherently indifferent, but that doesn't mean that there isn't value in empathy, order, and justice; it means that these things do not exist unless we endeavor to sustain them.
So right now I'm doing all that I can with the resources available. I don't know how much time I have, but I do know that the only way that any of us get through this is by collectively locking down and bracing for impact. May you all stay well, until then, I'll be here fighting.
