This week, nighttime in southeast Texas is a comfortable 64 degrees. Last week, in a once-in-a-century event, the temperature dipped down to the teens and unleashed human suffering with which people in a First World country are often unacquainted. In the aftermath as things rapidly thawed out and the wreckage of busted pipes less rapidly got cleaned up, a strange sentiment has taken hold. Many an otherwise thinking individual seems to think the federal government should be granted more powers to ensure that bad things never happen again.
The thinking—more accurately the feeling—goes that the disasters of the Texas electrical grid should have been prevented by federal oversight. The benevolent powers of bigger government, we are told, would ensure that every power generation plant is fully winterized. This, we want to believe, will save us.
The response is in certain respects understandable. The suffering was significant. Lives were lost and fear took hold as the delicate infrastructure of what we call civilization came temporarily unraveled. But, as it turns out, this was far from the worst-case scenario. According to the Texas Tribune, the alarming blackouts over days of frigid temperatures were far from the worst case scenario. But for the quick action of grid operators, damage resulting in months of outages could have occurred. The Texas system worked pretty well, all things considered.
Still, we want to insist every power plant should be fully equipped to sustain days-long runs of below-freezing temperatures. The way to ensure such immensely impractical and expensive preparation is our favorite overlord, the federal government. Never mind that this happens so rarely. Never mind the utter incompetence of behemoth bureaucracy. Some government entity should make sure we are safe.
If it will save one life…out of an abundance of caution…we need the experts to ensure our safety.
These have become the sniveling refrains of our civic life. What they miss are all the dangers we cannot predict and all the threats we do not yet see. Living in the false security of hyper-regulated big government solutions lulls us into complacency. Waking up in a house not designed for cold with no electricity to provide heat is not evidence of some government failure but evidence of reality.
If there were fully winterized power plants, there would be other catastrophes that could still occur. There is also some likelihood that federal oversight would not ensure winterized power plants the way people want to assume it would. People are people, wherever you go. If we personally struggle to ensure there are batteries in our own smoke detector and strongly consider giving up on trying to securely tighten the straps for the car seat of our own beloved and precious child, it’s rather foolish to assume that some bozo with a government ID badge is going to make sure the electrical grid is maintained to the highest standards to keep everyone safe just in case.
It’s not just the Texas freeze that has people pining for bigger government. The writer, social media personality, and funeral home director Caitlin Doughty had interesting thoughts to share as her funeral home struggles to meet the demand of ongoing public health crises. In a video put out at the end of January, Doughty describes the overwhelmed funeral home and the difficulty of meeting the needs of grieving families. The situation is objectively horrific.
So what is the solution? Doughty suggests some kind of centralized, government-run hotline would solve the issue. In Doughty’s imagining, cheerful and conscientious government employees would answer phone calls and efficiently dispatch drivers and prepare bodies for burial in a clean, well-lit facility. Of course, this is unlikely to materialize, not for the reason the Doughty seems to think, but because that does not represent human nature. People detached from the particulars, shuffling paper and answering calls remotely, will not be strongly motivated to do much of anything to alleviate the suffering. This pain cannot be diffused across a bureaucratic ladder.
More to the point, the centralized power is even less nimble than the overwhelmed funeral homes, even less able to respond in a humane and prompt manner. Such a government behemoth might have the refrigeration trucks Doughty referred to, but the centralized power would not have the ability to foresee where the trucks would be needed, and it would be no easier, in fact less easy, to move the trucks from a centralized power to the local places that need it.
Doughty, a mix of anger and terror in her face, channels the ire of so many pandemic victims and cold Texans when she asks, “Where is the government?” In the end, she says, “It’s like that scene in the disaster movie where the plane flies over and it doesn’t see you and for the first time you go, “Oh, s**t, no one is coming.”
But that is always the way it is. We can build sophisticated systems and backup plans and oversight committees. The nature of reality is disturbingly dynamic, unpredictable, and prone to disaster. In the face of catastrophe, there will not be a system to save us. In volatility, we discover how little we have to rely on and how much the close-knit, meaningful bonds of family protect us from lone exposure.
In an update video about the state of funeral homes in Los Angeles County, Doughty acknowledges as much herself. She says the funeral home is running more smoothly because of systems they have put in place to deal with the catastrophic situation. These systems are likely unique to that particular place and the people who work there and the people they serve. They likely encourage efficiency in ways that a centralized system could never replicate.
In the update video, Doughty continues to vent her frustration at the lack of government intervention. She reveals that there are, in fact, government plans at the state and federal level meant to address mass casualties. Interestingly, these plans are rarely dispatched as intended even when the need arises, as in the case of Hurricane Katrina. Despite having the plan, no one could agree who should actually be tasked with picking up the bodies, a situation that Doughty says illustrates how having a government plan can provide a false sense of security that leads to an even worse disaster response. While still calling for a massive government response, Doughty seems to unwittingly demonstrate why such a pipedream would not provide the security so many of us crave.
Perhaps Helen Keller stated it best when she wrote, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
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