Takeaways Twelve Months into a Pandemic and Post Texas Blizzard of 2021
Gotcha. You thought this was going to be a feel-good piece. Think again…
My grandparents mostly raised me. I grew up hearing stories of the great depression. During a period so dark and desperate, my grandmother and her four siblings, all close in age, shared a couple of pairs of shoes back in East Texas growing up. My grandmother started working at a restaurant when she was thirteen and had to bring her earnings home and give them to her parents. There was no working to earn extra money for school clothes back then. It was kids working for extra money so the family could eat dinner.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was then followed up by the Second World War. Not exactly a shining moment of happiness and excitement. Not in the U.S., nor the rest of the world. During the Blitz in London, the city was being bombed daily, and people were cowering in the safest corner of their homes with gas masks. My Grandfather was leaving Nacogdoches, TX, for the first time to go to war. My Grandmother was leaving to go to the big city of Houston at 15 to get a job at the phone company with her sister who was already working.
The 30s and 40s were amazingly trying times for all of our grandparents, and great grandparents, across the world. You could argue that the past few years have been especially difficult as well. Over 500,000 people have died from Covid in the past 12 months. A generation of children has had their education turned upside down by the disruption of a pandemic.
At a more local level, the state of Texas experienced one of the hardest winters on record, with a February blizzard leading to the near failure of the Texas electric grid and millions of people going without power for the better part of a week. During that time, you saw everything from rampant hoarding of groceries to a public hysteria around who did and didn’t have electricity, a self-inflicted identity politics based on who had lights on. It was that ugly.
Sacrifices
I’ve often thought about the idea of sacrifice, or delayed gratification. I think the idea of sacrifice is one of the strongest human principles and the key variable that has caused humanity to top of the food chain. Well, that and thumbs of course.
The idea that you have to sacrifice something of yourself now, so that you will prosper in the future is really old. Like extremely old. I’m not just talking about eating pizza and ramen for three years working through Law school sacrifice either. I’m talking about the Mayans sacrificing millions of people so the Gods would reward them with rain sacrifice.
It’s this principle of sacrifice, that I truly feel is still the most significant variable that drives success in people today. I’ve witnessed it repeatedly over my life. Most of the people that I know that are what most would classify as successful, either personally or professionally, have made some sort of significant sacrifice over their lifetime. Something that cost them an enormous amount of time and/or discomfort.
Perserverance
My grandparents didn’t have a choice about sacrifices. They had to do it. In the early part of the twentieth century, most people had to make sacrifices.
But today, most of us don’t feel as though we should or need to make sacrifices. When Covid-19 invaded our country twelve months ago, it didn’t find a hardened country ready to do what it takes to defeat a common enemy; it found a land of individuals, too many of them overweight, under-educated, and overly sheltered from personal sacrifice for a common good. It found a population of people teeming with a sense of entitlement rather than a community.
It took me several months to think about what I witnessed in the U.S. at the onset of the pandemic, and instinctively, my fallback was to assume that while at the national level, the character of our country was being exposed a bit, my Texas pride stepped in and assured me that us Texans still had what it takes to step up, come together, and persevere through hardship when it mattered. Then the Texas blizzard of 2021 struck.
I then witnessed many of my own friends and neighbors turn on each other. I saw local people taking pictures of community leaders’ homes and sharing them on social with the light on as some sort of evidence of “haves and have nots” electricity scandal. I saw people like myself that are Second Amendment advocates, bemoaning the local government for not providing them with unfettered access to electrical power and water when utilities failed because of the extreme weather.
Individuals and Community
I practice extreme accountability. It’s not always made me the most popular person, especially in a world that seems to intensely focused on telling other people what they are doing wrong as opposed to looking inward for things that we could do better. As a part of that personal philosophy, my big takeaway from the blizzard of 2021 was, I’m investing in a home generator this year. Another big takeaway from this year was that I need to create more of a system of checking in on the people close to my family and in our community. After the power looked like it would be out for a while, I began to message those close to us just to see how they were doing, and if there was anything they needed I had a surplus of. One of the best ways to assure survival in a disaster type scenario is to first be a part of a community, but also provide value to that community. That doesn’t mean to just be a part of community and then just ask for resources all the time, this also means you contribute. We are working on building that even more over the coming years.
We as a country, or even as a state, need to make up our minds who we want to be. Are we a country of individuals that demand our freedoms and limited government, while being left to our own devices in an open market, even in the face of natural disasters? Are we a country that is bonded by what we have in common, even in the face of disagreement, and willing to come together and sacrifice for the greater good and success of our community? Or are we simply a geographic region that consists of different tribes that identify each other by skin color, political dogma, or cultish ideology, and simply just don’t want to sacrifice anything for anyone that we don’t include in our tribe?
All of us need to do some serious soul search, as we move into the Post Covid phase, of who we want to be.
Personally, I plan to continue to focus on the things I truly control. I can’t force my county to move me up in the line to get vaccinated, but what I can do is do my best to get a needle in my arm as soon as possible. I’m not staying home, I’ve been going out and doing my thing since the beginning. I owe it to my community to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
Secondly, I can’t force my local electric company to invest in more generators and redundancy to ensure that I have access to electricity 100% of the time. I don’t get to make that call, and as such, I can’t promise that I’ll never go without power for an extended period of time again like we did last month. But what I can do is skip buying that PSAK-47 GF3 that I’ve been wanting for the better part of a year now and invest in a generator for my house. I can control that.
That’s just my plan. I’d encourage you to think intentionally about yours.