This past Sunday I drove from Ohio to Philadelphia and must’ve made a wrong turn, because I somehow ended up in John Carpenter’s “Escape from L.A.” What I thought was an amber alert went off on my phone amid the Schuylkill traffic, and later my local watering hole — shout out to The Fairview — was abuzz with news about a chemical spill rendering Philly’s water supply potentially hazardous. I tapped Twitter on my phone and alas, images of Targets, Acmes, and Wawas disintegrating into hydraulic despotism abounded.
The culprit? An alert had indeed been put out by city officials Sunday morning “out of an abundance of caution” in response to a release of chemicals from a processing plant in Bucks County Friday night. Not long after, a second statement was issued, notifying residents that water was safe until midnight Monday. But never mind that — the sense of impending doom was not to be tamped down. One of the comments in the Twitter threads (never read the threads!) suggested that Biden was to blame and that drinking the water would turn your daughter into a lesbian. This was an attempt at humor. I think.
To be serious, Philadelphia water is consumed by its own millions of residents but also its community of myriad commuters, including tens of thousands of daily commuters from New Jersey. A water crisis, however small or short-lived, deserves everyone’s attention. That said, the effort to understand a problem — and a potential crisis — is all too often filtered, pardon the pun, through the lens of fear and outright hostility. The journalist Haynes Johnson used the phrase “The Age of Anxiety” to describe our era in his book on the shifting world of McCarthyism to the “war on terror.” Poor Haynes. If only he’d had waited to COVID-19 and the Trump era. Twitter wasn’t even a growing concern in 2006, the year of his book’s publication.
My colleagues and I at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick have written about this in a forthcoming book, “Governors and the Crises that Define Them.” Some of the historic cases hit close to home: Gov. Phil Murphy’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic; Gov. Tom Kean and the dioxin crisis in Newark in 1983. Eagleton Director John Farmer and Kean write about how New York and New Jersey managed the crisis that unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001. They should know, they literally wrote the book about the government’s response on that fateful day.
The Big 3
All in all, there are three big reasons, it seems to me, why we manage catastrophe so poorly. The first is our polarized politics, which sees every crisis as opportunity to assault the party in power if it’s not ours. Political scientists have studied this “sorting” phenomenon over the past several decades, and our political class and party apparatchiks have indeed become more polarized. And our culture wars, fueled by a 24-hour news cycle, have led to virtual combat at least since the 1990s. As we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, that combat has become all too real.
The second reason we manage crises so poorly, and I’m thinking about everyday citizens, is because we’ve become so alienated from our representatives. The distance between everyday Americans and their government has grown beyond our ability to see one another as flesh-and-blood human beings. We have become spectators in democratic life. This has led to viewing politics as a kind of Wide World of Wrestling, a world of villains, heroes, fools and curiosities. Former President Donald Trump has understood this as well as anybody. Sadly, the past 25 years of theatrics have not exactly instilled confidence in the American electorate in the wisdom of our political class. The impeachment of President Bill Clinton, the 2000 election’s outsourcing to the Supreme Court, 9/11, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, COVID-19 — need I say more? These do not exactly inspire the warm and fuzzies for our political leaders. Distance in a republic amplifies and distorts differences. But great distance — and incompetence — is truly murderous to the “affections” President James Madison said we must have for our government. Here in New Jersey, there is a statewide election taking place this year for all 120 seats in the Legislature. As important as is it, New Jerseyans have shown little interest in these contests.
Finally, we have become a disaggregated social-media mess of alternative realities — untethered from objective truth, but more importantly, from one another. The atomization of information that makes each of us comfortable with our beliefs, is perhaps the most difficult obstacle to overcome. So, when the water goes bad, maybe, just maybe, the “critical race theorist-nonbinary world” may be at fault. Or pick your dystopian political-identity vision of choice. The bottom line is that a politics of fear abounds.
How do we get out of this world of carnivalesque chaos? The first step is an ounce of faith. Perhaps not so much in the system, our leadership class or even our ideologies. A small step to seeing each other as decent, caring, loving and full human beings might be a good place to start. Villainization begins at home among “We, the People.” So does the path to healing.
Let the water flow.