Christchurch, the White Victim Complex and Savage Capitalism

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Despite his own denials, anti-Muslim xenophobia underwrites the 74-page manifesto compiled by Australian mass murderer Brendan Tarrant. The title itself, The Great Replacement, references a far-right conspiracy theory holding that white genocide is being engineered by useful idiots amongst the liberal elite advocating mass migration, demographic growth and cultural diversity.

To this conspiracy theory, the failure to uphold cultural and racial supremacy is identified with the destruction of whites. The politics of the dummy spit underwrite the belief that acknowledging the existence of and respecting other cultures and ethnic groups is tantamount to the death of the Self. It reflects the mentality of the infantile ego, yet to discover the existence of others outside of the realm of the known, associated in practise with the ego.

It is not a little telling that this atrocity was carried out on the same day as the latest in a series of large-scale climate strikes by secondary students throughout Australia and the world. On the one side, those directly threatened by a very real crisis took active measures to do something positive and constructive. On the other, a small group of people preoccupied with the threat of the existence of others carried out a negative and destructive atrocity. The contrast could hardly be clearer.

What to make of the difference between the two? In an eponymous 2017 work, anthropologist Ghassan Hage enquires, is racism an environmental threat? Hage explicitly links the global rise in racism, demagoguery and bigotry, of which we can quite easily include this latest Christchurch massacre, with a reaction amongst elite groups to the social consequences of climate change.

In awakening a need for meaningful and profound social change amongst increasingly vast sectors of the world’s population, Hage argued, the climate crisis has come to present increasingly clear and present threats to elite privilege. It has done so in the main, he contended, through rude infringements of scientific fact and lived daily experience on the ideological mores that have upheld a world order of haves and have nots built on 500 years of colonialism.

Not the least of these was the Self vs. Other binary that had been at the core of what Edward Said called ‘Orientalism.’ Orientalism referred to the paternalistic frame of reference for subjugated peoples used to rationalise colonial extractivism as ‘civilising the savages’—a mentality with roots in the Roman propensity to view everyone not under their control as ‘barbarians,’ until they were ‘civilised’ (with all the attendant tributes for the imperial power).

Such formed the basis, Hage argued, for a tendency within advanced capitalism to oscillate between what he called‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ capitalism—the ‘savage’ being that of the racialised associated with the early period of colonialism. The ‘civilised,’ by contrast, was of the type commonly associated with modern industrial capitalism and the liberal democracies associated with it.

This oscillating tendency reflected in essence a scapegoating dynamic, deriving from the fact that capitalist development remained an ongoing process after it had reached an advanced stage. This was specially insofar as late capitalism is plagued by periodic crises driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, or by democratic challenges from below. This, Hage argued, drove the oscillation between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ modes, as privileged elites returned to violence to rescue their privilege from the shortcomings of the system that upheld them, or from democracy, or from both.

Periodic returns to the ‘savage’ modalities and mentalities accompanying the conditions that produced its birth was encouraged then as a stopgap against crisis—in the manner documented by sociological research into moral panic and the documented tendency of elite-controlled corporate media to manufacture consent through scaremongering and the production of deviance. Herman and Chomsky produced a classic work exploring this phenomenon; more recent scholarship has identified moral panic in the process.

The Islamic bugbears and hobgoblins in particular were created as a result of the power of the corporate media to control the meaning of deviance and impose their definition on public discourse—not on the features of those so demonised. The global instability created by a world order in which the richest one percent owned half the world’s wealth and the richest ten percent owned ¾ of it could be blamed on the Islamic Other.

Which brings us back to this latest example of white supremacist terrorism in Christchurch. Nothing about this atrocity and the terrible loss of life is special, other than the fact that it took place on the same day as the latest round of climate strikes lead by secondary students. The contrast between the preoccupation with conspiracy and manufactured crisis and the very clear scientific understanding of climate crisis reflects with a unique conspicuousness the function of the former in dodging the reality of and constructing scapegoats for the latter.

If whites are feeling insecure, this has nothing to do with the social and environmental consequences of global economic modality built on the assumption that the world is an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump—it is the fault of those existing outside of the culturally hegemonic and supremacist monoculture for existing. Herein lies the scapegoating dynamic of savage capitalism, built on a white victim complex refusing to acknowledge any difference between respecting other cultures and the death of the Self.

As Ghassan Hage noted, the impetus for the scapegoating of savage capitalism and the white victim complex arises out of accumulation crisis, as the very real social, economic and environmental consequences of maintaining the world of haves and have-nots becomes harder and harder to sweep under the rug. As corporate-captured governments around the world continue to fail to act on climate change in prioritising profit over the planet, opposition from the young in particular can only ever grow.

In the face of this dire threat of democracy, the value of manufactured conspiracy theories alleging racial existential threats to be used as scapegoats increases accordingly—all the more so as the climate crisis continues to worsen, presenting an increasingly unavoidable existential threat to human society.

Atrocities like those perpetrated in Christchurch in the final analysis are driven by the impulse to blame the consequences of the social and economic modalities behind climate change on the victims and any other convenient scapegoats. They are driven by the impulse to reassert the fundamental modalities and mentalities that produced the interconnected crises of our age in the first place.

As long as they continue to be useful in suppressing the ultimate reality that there is no class privilege on a dead planet, prominent Islamophobes in the corporate media and politics (Andrew Bolt and Cori Bernadi here in Australia being prime examples) will continue to promote the conspiracy theories driving the likes of Brendan Tarrant and Anders Brevik to deadly violence. In the end, the terror that these atrocities produce for the affected communities only reflects the racialised terror from which the Western-dominated world order was born, and whose consequences condemn us all to ecological Armageddon.

In Tech Platforms, White Supremacists Found Their Amplifier

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In the 1960s, reporters became attuned to the power they had over the public’s attention, and some tried to use it judiciously. While white supremacists, especially members of the Ku Klux Klan, offered privileged insider access to reporters who provided favorable coverage, the black press chose to ignore the Klan unless it was to highlight the group’s decreasing power. Jewish civil rights organizations suggested that journalists practice “quarantine” and actively choose not to cover the American Nazi Party. The Klan and the Nazis wanted attention. In each of these situations, media outlets acted as gatekeepers that could strategically silence those seeking to use the press as a megaphone.

Social media has fundamentally changed who controls the volume on certain social issues. Facebook, Google, and other platform companies want to believe they have created a circumvention technology that connects people directly to one another without any gates, walls, or barriers. Yet this connectivity has also allowed some of the worst people in this world to find one another, get organized, and use these same platforms to harass and silence others. The platform companies do not know how to fix, or perhaps do not understand, what they have built. In the meantime, previously localized phenomena spread around the globe, so much so that the culture of American-style white supremacy turned up in a terrorist attack on Muslims in New Zealand.

As a sociologist at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, I study how technology is used by social movements, including groups on the far left and the far right. Since the uprisings in the Middle East and elsewhere in 2011, we have witnessed thousands of protests and events inspired by and organized through social media. Progressive social movements routinely use networking technologies to grow their ranks and publicize their ideas. White supremacists have their own ways of deploying the same technology.

In the aftermath of outbursts of violence like the one in New Zealand, traditional news outlets draw heavily upon social-media postings for insights into the perpetrator’s motives and mine them for details that make stories sound more authoritative and vivid. Certain oddball phrases, Internet memes, and obscure message boards garner mainstream attention for the first time. Inevitably, people Google them.

The extra attention that these ideas gain in the aftermath of a violent attack isn’t just an unfortunate side effect of news coverage. It’s the sound system by which extremist movements transmit their ideas to a broader public, and they are using it with more and more skill.    

One variable remains consistent across all networked movements: The moderation policies of different platforms directly affect how groups amplify political ideologies online. For white supremacists and other extremists, they tend to use anonymous message boards to plan manipulation campaigns. These places traffic in racist, sexist, and transphobic content and link to obscure podcasts and blogs. Moderation is rare and tends to occur only when too much attention is drawn to a certain post. In some forums, posts self-delete and leave few traces behind.

Far more useful in reaching a new audience are places like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, which remove objectionable content—but may not do so before it spreads virally.

Taking advantage of that dynamic, the murderer in New Zealand posted a full press kit on an anonymous message board prior to live-streaming his terrifying acts on Facebook. Many have labelled it a manifesto, but it reads more like a collection of copy-and-pasted white supremacist conspiracy theories and memes. It would never have been notable on its own. This individual did not have the power or influence to boost these worn-out tropes. This manifesto could have probably existed in perpetuity on obscure document-hosting sites, and no one would have noticed. For platforms, this kind of content is simply white noise.

Explosive violence was the signal necessary to call attention to these posts. The New Zealand attacker used the live-streaming feature of Facebook to control the narrative, even to the point of saying “subscribe to PewDiePie”—a meme referencing a popular right-wing YouTube influencer—during his broadcast. He succeeded in linking his deeds to PewDiePie’s fame. As of today, Google search returns on “PewDiePie” include references to the Christchurch attack.

The New Zealand attacker also knew others would be recording and archiving the video for further amplification. When choosing to publish on an anonymous forum first, he also ensured that group of sympathetic trolls would re-upload content in the wake of takedowns by the major platforms. We’ve seen this tactic many times before. Sometimes it’s used in playful ways. When Scientology tried to get a leaked promotional video featuring Tom Cruise removed from the Internet, users made a point of reposting it in a variety of places—making it impossible to stamp out. Other instances are darker: Some users attempted to keep videos on YouTube of a misogynistic murderer from Santa Barbara, California. The scale of these efforts can be startling. In the first 24 hours after the Christchurch attack, Facebook alone removed 1.5 million postings of the video. In a statement late Saturday, the company said it was still working around the clock to “remove violating content using a combination of technology and people.”

Weeks before Friday’s attack, the New Zealand shooter littered other social media platforms with memes and articles about immigrants and Muslims to ensure that journalists would have plenty of material to scour. These sorts of cryptic trails are becoming an increasingly common tactic of media manipulators, who anticipate how journalists will cover them. The perpetrator of the New Zealand attacker clearly hoped that a new white supremacist would hear a siren song by directly connecting with his words and deeds.

The sophistication of these manipulators presents a challenge for the media. In describing these dynamics, I’m not mentioning the New Zealand killer’s name. Other than PewDiePie, I’m not citing any of the other personalities and tropes he tried to publicize. Withholding details runs counter to the usual rules of storytelling—show, don’t tell—but it also helps slow down the spread of white-supremacist keywords. Journalists and regular Internet users need to be cognizant of their role in spreading these ideas, especially because the platform companies haven’t recognized theirs.

Just as journalists of the past learned to cover white supremacists differently from other groups, platform companies must address the role their technology plays as the megaphone for white supremacists. In designing, deploying, and scaling up their broadcast technologies, Internet companies need to understand that white supremacists and other extremists will find and exploit the weak points. While Facebook, Google, Twitter and others have resisted calls for accountability, there is no longer any doubt about how these platforms—and the media environment now growing up around them—are used to amplify hate.

The Dying Howls of British Politics

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In the movies, shapeshifters such as werewolves, witches, and demons show their true form when fatally wounded. This week Brexit, 33 months since conception and only a fortnight before its due date, showed what it has always truly been: politicians haranguing each other over esoteric laws, in the name of unbridgeable differences. The sheen of Parliament has fallen away. It is, to copy the front page of at least two major British newspapers this morning, a “meltdown.”

Prime Minister Theresa May has now returned from the continent twice, cap in hand, with a deal for exiting the European Union. Each time the proposal has been destroyed in Parliament. Tonight in London, May will open a third “meaningful vote” on Britain’s departing terms—a phrase which, even by British comedic standards, plumbs new levels of irony.

On Tuesday the chaos peaked after Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, a man whose private-school baritone bellows like the blunderbuss of a 19th century redcoat, announced the U.K. could not leave the EU without remaining committed to the so-called “backstop,” a protocol ensuring no hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, should Britain crash out of the union without a deal. Cox’s ruling, couched in dense legalese, was itself a rebuke of the deal May brokered with Brussels that had boasted of legal “instruments,” reading a lot like last-minute flimflam. The verdict irked many members of Cox’s own Conservative Party, and for hours MPs from all parties confronted him, each frosty comment cloaked in the arcane language of Parliament, which included addressing Cox as “my honorable friend.” (Members of Parliament are not allowed to call each other by name.)

It was a volley of shit sandwiches, British-style. Most spoke only ostensibly to Cox, using him to dig their heels into respective trenches on either side of the Brexit debate.

Those repudiating Cox included members of the anti-EU European Research Group, chaired by Jacob Rees-Mogg, a millionaire hedge-funder who once canvassed for votes with his nanny. The ERG, which wants Brexit at almost any cost, has opposed May’s arguably necessary deal-making concessions at every turn. When Brexit supposedly kicks in, on March 29, they figure, the country will have no deal, and thus “crash out” of the European Union, going from a massive customs union into relative isolation, with all the economic disruption that entails. The ERG, along with a surprisingly large number of other Brexiteers, now believe that’s worth the risk, in order to avoid leaving any loopholes through which undesirable goods, services, or people could pass from Europe to the U.K.

These hardliners’ intransigence may prove their undoing. On Wednesday, a motion to take a no-deal Brexit off the table passed narrowly. (This doesn’t change the fact that a no-deal Brexit is still, legally, the default if the U.K. cannot come up with a plan.) Today May opens a vote on whether to ask the EU’s permission to delay Britain’s withdrawal. Within a week, she will attempt a third time to get her deal through Parliament, with an ultimatum that, should it fail, the exit date may be extended, and Brexit could even be quashed altogether. This should get May’s third deal vote passed, though any deal must ultimately be negotiated by the EU’s remaining 27 member states, and a head-spinning number of possible outcomes remain.

Regular Brits, meanwhile, have almost disappeared from the Brexit conversation. From workers set to lose jobs, to those on the much-debated Irish border and hundreds of thousands of expats across continental Europe whose visa fates are uncertain, the lives of millions have been reduced to percentage points on GDP, cannon fodder in the illusory crusade for sovereignty.

Many of the politicians who claimed to speak for the “person on the Clapham omnibus,” a popular British phrase for an everyman, have long retreated from Brexit’s frontline. Nigel Farage, who triumphantly declared in 2016 that the referendum was Britain’s “Independence Day,” has scaled back his day-to-day political activities and now makes a killing on Fox News and other media channels. If the people ever had a voice, it, like Theresa May’s on Tuesday, has vanished to a barely audible croak.

Entire magazines, podcasts and TV shows exist to service Brexit’s Sisyphean bureaucracy. It sucks the air out of any other story. Last week the debate on a sharp rise in knife crime across the U.K., on the BBC’s flagship political show Question Time, lasted just a few minutes between slanging matches over Brexit. Rarely does any political platform last more than five minutes before somebody mentions the B-word. Britain, a nation of 66 million people, is paralyzed beneath a political impasse that is increasingly confined to Westminster. So much for a popular referendum.

In June 2016, when Britain birthed this monster, I appeared on a German television special that ran until almost 7am the next morning. Towards the end, our host asked the three Brits “What happens next?” Our instant reply: “No idea.” Minutes later we emerged into a sun-soaked Berlin morning, braindead as the clubbers who poured from the entrances of nearby techno dungeons. Nobody spoke. Our little island had chosen to raise its drawbridge to Europe, and all we could see was the moat.

That moat only seems to have grown wider since then. Right-wingers have rallied in hardline, suicidal fervor around a no-deal position, claiming it won’t be as bad as economists predict, while some “Remainers” still cling to the hope of a second “People’s Vote” to cancel Brexit, an equally catastrophic reversal that would drag Britons’ faith in democracy to dangerous new depths. Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left Labour has admirably attempted to defend Britain’s welfare state amidst this three-ring circus. But on Brexit the Labour party is, like the Tories, hopelessly paralyzed. The “customs union” Labour recently proposed, to give the U.K. a say in European economic affairs, would require the EU to break precedent on trade policy. And May will almost certainly not countenance it as an alternative to her own negotiations.

We still have almost no idea what will happen next. The country’s sense of political reality is rapidly fading, like the protagonists lost inside the psychedelic layer cake of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi blockbuster Inception. As one British political commentator yesterday said, we are no longer at the point where MPs are experts conferring information to the media. They are as clueless as everybody else.

It is often too easy to poke fun at British representative democracy—the pageantry, the yelling, the leather seats and ancient, wood-lined halls—but Brexit has truly shown that beneath the pomp, Parliament really is a bunch of mostly wealthy Britons shouting angrily into a void. This week’s pandemonium has revealed that many of them don’t even really know what they’re doing. If the future of the nation weren’t at stake, that could be quite the cockle-warming thought.

Cockle farming, incidentally, may be terminally affected by Brexit.

In Salinas, Puerto Rico, Vulnerable Americans Are Still Trapped in the Ruins Left by Hurricane Maria

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Abandoned by their country, residents refuse to accept the idea that they will never recover.

Nearly a year and a half after Hurricane Maria, about three-fourths of the houses in the Sierra Brava neighborhood of Salinas, Puerto Rico stand battered and empty.

Some families left because their homes were rendered uninhabitable and they had no money to fix them. Others left because they lost their jobs. In responding to Maria, federal agencies had hired some local people, but just for a few months; meanwhile, many other jobs disappeared and have not come back.

Sierra Brava lies low along the south side of PR Route 3 in the shadow of Salinas City Hall. Go for a walk through its now largely silent streets, and one residence in particular will catch your eye. On a corner along Calle Abraham Peña, the neighborhood’s four-block-long main avenue, stands a small grey house trimmed in bright blue and topped by a blue plastic tarp. It is in even worse shape than some of the abandoned houses. But Wilma Miranda Ramos still calls it home.

The hurricane shifted Wilma’s ramshackle little box on its foundation, separating the front and rear halves and giving it a distinct sideways tilt. Thanks to waters that flooded down the nearby Río Nigua from the mountains on the day of the storm, the floors now undulate wildly and give underfoot. Large portions of the ceiling are gone, and blue light streams in through the tarp above. Water pours in with every rainfall.

Wilma explained that she’d been living there six years, but because the house was not hers, she could get no help with repairs. “Now I have a stitched-together roof,” she said, “but as I have nowhere to go I’m still here. Staying here in these conditions is not easy. But since I have my daughter and grandson of four years here with me, living here and not in the street is worth gold.”

Certain now that no federal help will be coming, Wilma said, “I hope my guardian angel arrives soon.”

In the summer of Maria, the region around Salinas had an unemployment rate that hovered between 15 and 20 percent and a poverty rate of 54%. The median household income in Salinas was a little over $16,000. The city was in economic decline, rendering it deeply vulnerable to devastation by any hurricane, and the monstrous Maria was not just any hurricane.

More than a century of U.S. colonial rule, culminating in a harsh federal plan to deal with the island’s debt to vulture capitalists, guaranteed that Maria’s destructive force would be multiplied by socioeconomic vulnerability. To make matters worse, federal disaster assistance to Puerto Ricans after Maria was much smaller and was doled out much more slowly than the assistance that went to Texas and Florida after hurricanes Harvey and Irma that same season.

Across Puerto Rico, according to the New York Times, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was responsible for awarding home-repair grants, rejected 58 percent of applications. When they did provide funds, the amount was often inadequate to restore a severely damaged house; the median grant was only $1,800, compared with about $9,127 in Texas after Harvey.

In Sierra Brava, only a lucky few managed to wrangle any home-restoration money out of FEMA. Roofs and the spaces where roofs used to be remain covered in blue tarp. The tap water is foul and undrinkable. Electricity was restored about four months after Maria, but with rates two to three times the cost of power on the mainland, people are falling farther and farther behind on their bills; as a result they now risk seeing their lights go out again, this time shut off by the power company.

Many houses in the neighborhood have been handed down within the same family for several generations, some going all the way back to Spanish rule. And that became many residents’ biggest problem. For almost a year after the storm, FEMA was approving repair funds only for those who could show proof of ownership, and many did not have sufficient documentation.

FEMA finally started accepting affidavits as proof of ownership last August but did not ensure that previously rejected homeowners were informed of the policy change. Anyway, by then, many had abandoned their ruined houses and moved away for good.

“It has just stayed the same way”

On a dead-end side street near Wilma’s home, another woman called us over to have a look at her house, a more substantial concrete structure with a vivid orange paint job and no roof. Throughout, jagged pieces of blue fabric hung from strands of rope above, as if in some ill-conceived art installation. The house was empty except for a stove and a refrigerator, and a couple of ruined mattresses.

The woman, Socorro Rolon, pointed to the shredded tarp. “This was given to me by the church, and I had to go look for some poles to hold it up, and me and a guy from the church put everything like this.” The tarp didn’t last long. “Everything got wet. My husband and I slept there on those old mattresses over there, and everything was wet, nothing could be saved.”

Socorro and her husband had taken refuge in Salinas’ emergency shelter during the hurricane. “When we returned from the shelter,” she said, “we found total destruction. So we went back to the shelter, but since my husband has had a stroke, we had to return to the house even though it was destroyed. We did what we could. The hurricane destroyed half the world over here. It took the street, and didn’t spare anyone.”

Maria survivors who received home-restoration money from FEMA could apply to a program called Tu Hogar Renace (Your Home Reborn), which sent crews to do repairs. Socorro and her husband received some FEMA money; she didn’t say how much. “So,” she said, “we signed up with Renace, and they came four times to check the house. I have a letter they sent, and it said the house couldn’t be fixed,” at least not for the amount of money they had. “It stayed like this, and we lived in it.” When life in a roofless house finally became unbearable, they rented a room in a neighbor’s house.

Tu Hogar Renace has received almost four thousand complaints about the quality or incompleteness of their work, and the Puerto Rican government has launched an investigation. But that won’t get Socorro out of her predicament. “So,” she said, “we have the house and a check that FEMA gave us, but they didn’t help anymore afterwards, and what we get from Social Security isn’t much. I get about $200 and he gets about $300 or so.”

Where they once lived for free in their own house, now, she said, “we are paying to live where we are because we cannot live on the street.”

In seeking help for home restoration, residents faced several obstacles. The closest FEMA office taking applications was in the city of Guayama, a half-hour drive east of Salinas. For car-less residents whose friends and neighbors had fled—and given the lack of a good public transportation system—that office might as well have been in Washington, DC. Those who could get themselves to Guayama found that application forms were in English, but at least the people in the office spoke Spanish.

Those calling the FEMA help line found non-Spanish-speaking employees on the other end. Residents could also apply online, but for four months after the hurricane, Sierra Brava had no electricity. Even if they got access to the Internet, senior citizens who had no family members nearby to help them were often stymied by the FEMA website. And for those who did get their applications submitted, the inspectors who came to check out their houses spoke only English; the documents they had to sign to receive compensation were also in English.

Waiting for FEMA . . .

Madeleine Flores Tenazoa, 30, had volunteered to be our guide and translator in Salinas. She is a kind of unofficial community organizer, deeply rooted in Sierra Brava. She showed us her grandmother’s house, which had been in her family for many decades. FEMA provided a paltry $400 to repair the home’s severely damaged roof and nothing to replace the contents of its flooded-out rooms.

Madeleine told us, “When they came, they asked, ‘Where is the furniture you lost? My grandma said it was all ruined, so it got hauled away. They said, ‘Well then we aren’t going to give you nothing, since we can’t see what you lost.’”

Her grandmother wasn’t the only one to have this problem, and word got around. In and around Salinas, we saw big curbside piles of ruined furniture and appliances, one bearing a hand-painted sign reading “No toque” (“Don’t touch”). Madeleine said that if city workers come now to remove the debris, “Those people say, ‘No, no, no! We are waiting for FEMA. They need to see what we lost!’ But come on, it’s been a year and a half. FEMA’s not coming.”

About a mile south of Sierra Brava is Playa de Salinas, the seafront area that Maria hit even harder than the central city. Riding through the area with Madeleine, we noticed an elderly woman sitting on a stack of concrete blocks in the dirt outside a small half-built house. She had a push broom with her and was shelling gandules—beans she’d plucked from the large bushes that grew nearby.

The woman, Fela Suren, called us over. She said she was “eighty something” years old. The house was being built for her by a local church, but the work was on pause until she or they could get more money together. Next to the unfinished house stood her longtime home, minus its roof and a couple of walls. It was clear that before Maria, it had been a larger, more attractive house than her new concrete-block one was going to be.

Most of Fela’s furniture and appliances sat exposed to the Caribbean sun and rain. A small, new section of roof covered only the kitchen area, which was now serving as Fela’s bedroom. The room was now open to the outdoors on one side. Her bed had big hardwood head- and foot-boards and was draped with  mosquito netting. Out back, her well’s hand pump still produced water, but it was a milky yellow color.

Fela said she has no family in Salinas, but she has good neighbors. One of them cooks meals for her and brings her water to drink. She spends her days tidying up in and around her ruined house and the construction site. As Fela spoke, she was all smiles. At eighty-something, she seemed to be leaving the past in the past and looking to the future. But in that future, she declared, “I never want to see anything like that hurricane again.”

The story of recovery from a devastating hurricane like Maria will always be a long and painful one—but it has to begin somewhere. For many residents of Puerto Rico, that story still hasn’t started. Until something changes, their story is one of survival, not recovery. It isn’t a nice one, but they want every one of us to hear it.

As Madeleine urged in a parting comment, “People need to come here and see how we are trying to live.”