The End of the World?
New Orlean s as a Watershed Event

© Frodo Okulam 2005

People (or at least the news media) were asking televangelist Pat Robertson if the recent hurricanes and earthquakes meant the end of the world was at hand. Aside from the futility of asking this question of someone who believes Hurricane Katrina is due to Ellen DeGeneris announcing the Emmys-(yes, he really said this!)-I think they have a point.

The destruction in New Orleans, and elsewhere around the world, really does signal the End of the World. This is the end of the world as we have known it. The end of the world of Big Oil, the end of the world of consumerism, the end of the world of perpetual economic growth, the end of "progress," the end of ignoring the balance in the natural world. The end of pretending Global Warming isn't happening. The end of denial about racism and classism in America.

We have lost an entire US city. If this is not a watershed event, I don't know what is. In fact it is literally so-if the wetlands in this watershed had been left in their natural state, instead of paved over with developments protected by levees the government did not see fit to repair, the storm surge would have harmlessly flooded the tidelands.

As we begin an economic spiral downward in the disintegration of the governmental/corporate infrastructure under escalating pressure from this and many other disasters and their aftermaths, I wonder whether it is also the end of the world of human cooperation. Whether we will become a giant New Orleans superdome, waiting in rising filth and violence until we are engulfed. Whether we will burn what is left of the forests for firewood and then perish like the people of Easter Island, with nothing left to eat but each other. We used to think these kinds of visions were "doom and gloom," the province of perpetual naysayers and apocalyptic evangelists.

Now the visions are real, the descent into helplessness and chaos of an entire city imprinted on our collective mind's eye. Denial is a river in Egypt, and an ocean here: one that has been forever flooded by the storm surge of real lives lost. Are we doomed to drown in this tsunami of hopelessness? Or is another future possible?

Starhawk is on site in New Orleans right now, working with Common Ground in a grass-roots relief effort. In her article, "Who Will Take Out the Garbage: A Report from New Orleans" (see www.starhawk.org), she begins, "It's like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic move-a crowd of people gathered in the street outside the local tavern… the roofs are off, the houses are molding away from the inside, and the streets are piled with garbage that, six weeks after the hurricane, has not been picked up."

It strikes me that this also resembles a scene from Starhawk's own book, The Fifth Sacred Thing. She goes on to describe how the people begin to pick up the garbage themselves. Read her article if you can-it is filled with her humor and creativity. When her friends called the Emergency Services line and were told that the Southern Baptist Convention was now responsible for solid waste disposal, she says, "Maybe it's the immersion thing-some deep religious connection to cleanliness? Accept Jesus into your heart and He will rapture your dead refrigerator into some other dimension?"

Anyway, it was the neighborhood folks and Pagan volunteers who rolled up their sleeves and collected the garbage. Starhawk praises the neighborhood spirit in New Orleans, "where neighbors know each other and care about each other and have a place where people go and meet and hang out together." In the areas on the edge of the worst destruction, people are coming back and finding each other and beginning to dig out. "If we support each other's dreams, if we deal with the garbage, if we take care of each other and do what needs to be done, some beauty will be born out of all this mess," Starhawk says.

SisterSpirit member Solaria, who is a medium, said she connected recently with some spirits in New Orleans who had not yet departed for the Summerland. "Why are you hanging around?" she asked. "We're worried about our community!" they answered. On the day after the flood, the vision I had was of boats: sending spirit-boats toward those who might be having trouble finding their way to the other side. But when Solaria told about those she was seeing, what I saw was not boats but a floating city.

It was a city built to float on the water, rising with the tides, riding the storms. A city alight with candles of hope. A city of neighbors in touch with each other and with the rhythms of Mother Earth. A city very like the community Starhawk describes in The Fifth Sacred Thing. And a community like Starhawk praises, like Luisah Teish grew up in, in New Orleans-now beyond the substandard housing of corporate development and safely above whatever the water level might be.

Is this world possible? Is it possible for us to get out of our cars and onto our bicycles and into our kayaks and build a new society based not on the oil stolen from Mother Earth's past by a few huge corporations, but on the small energy lamps of neighbors caring for each other?

It is possible, and possible now, if we begin to "be the change we want to see in the world." In a thousand small ways, we join the rising watershed tide toward the beginning of the new society. At least one SisterSpirit member went to Washington, DC to the big actions in September for peace. Others ride bikes or run their cars or furnaces on veggie oil or biodiesel. Most of all, each of us begins to think more deeply about caring for one another. Doing the small things you can: reaching out to a neighbor or a sister in need. Giving to groups like Common Ground, www.commongroundrelief.org working in New Orleans and other areas of need worldwide, or to local efforts like SisterSpirit's Michelle's Heart Fund. Working for change in whatever way you feel called.

The End of the World is here-and it's the beginning of the new! May She bless this turning of the Wheel!

--Frodo Okulam