Folks do know what’s happening in Gary, right?
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To clarify: it’s been another one of those shocking-but-not-surprising things, to see how little note the media have taken of what’s happening in #Gary, Indiana - a predominantly Black, relatively poor, post-industrial city with a shrinking population.
Roughly 20,000 households have now gone ten days without electric power since an unusually strong derecho tore through on August 11th. In all that time, local electric utility NIPSCO has been unable to restore service, with all the predictable consequences: spoiled food and medicines, no recourse to air conditioning or refrigeration, local businesses unable to operate, people having to spend heavily on generator fuel (and suffer all the pollution that accompanies their use), difficulty charging phones and medical equipment, and schools remaining closed.
A ten-day outage would be inconceivable in most places, of course, so NIPSCO’s inability to restore power really stands out. The reason behind it is clear to everyone on the ground there: a local activist describes the situation as “organized abandonment in a deindustrialized sacrifice zone.”
#Mutualaid is currently being organized through a space called…the Space, one of a few autonomous projects in Gary (including the Joy Bomb social center, where I gave a Lifehouse talk on the last leg of my North American tour) where folks are storing goods and doing pop-up distribution.
But more such spaces are needed: “Ten more, a hundred. More in every neighborhood, to ground ourselves in moments when we already know nobody is coming to save us. It’s hard to take that leap and [gather the] confidence to just act, so spaces are really important – they give us that courage to *just move*, because it sets a sort of tempo to the rhythm of crisis. Knowing where to go within a few miles sets a frame of returning to something, when navigating a whole terrain of abandonment.”
I’m currently trying to get a bead on how the rest of us can best support autonomous mutual aid efforts in Gary, and will let you know as soon as I have more insight.
@adamgreenfield I was just talking to a coworker who lives in a nearby town (which is also out of power) it’s crazy!
@namhenderson I wonder how the Joy Bomb people are doing?
@adamgreenfield I’m afraid I don’t get reference?
@namhenderson Mutual-aid hub out of Gary, and one of the stops on my second North American Lifehouse tour. In asking around, I’ve just now learned there was some kind of schism, and there’s a new community space there called…the Space.
