Joplin

I’ve avoided writing about the Joplin tornado. Older I get, the harder some things are to put into perspective. I find myself getting emotional when I think of a good, solid, earnest community being ripped apart so quickly and so dramatically. Just as I still have dreams of good people being harmed in Iraq. This Joplin thing touches a sympathetic nerve. There is immediacy to the storm for me. WitchWoman’s house was badly damaged with her in it. Thank God, she is fine although still rattled. Friends of mine lost everything except their lives. The numbers are so impersonal. Things like 150+ dead and 2,000 homes destroyed, thousands of jobs lost. From a used city manager’s point of view, the storm was the worst case scenario. Image a three layer cake missing the middle layer. That is Joplin. Bisected. Cut in half. The guts of the City are gone. Much credit goes to Mark Rohr (Joplin’s City Manager) for his work. From what I can tell, he has performed admirably. But this is not a cynical case of not letting a disaster go to waste. Mark, nor anybody else in Joplin, seems to be thinking of anything but recovery, rebuilding, weathering the storm. It is exactly the attitude you expect from a blue-collar town like Joplin. Get back in the saddle and get on with it. I admire the folks there immensely.

I spent twenty-five years in the Joplin area. The place means something to me. To see the folks there dig through the rubble of their lives breaks my heart. I am heading back up there next week. My initial three weeks there were primarily focused on making sure WitchWoman was safe and protected.

I ran into one of my former students who came home when the tornado destroyed her parent’s home. With tears in her eyes, she told me that place matters. She now has a life in Washington, DC, but when her hometown was hit, she came home to help. It made me want to cry, too.

Place does matter. It is the disconnection to place that opens the body to infections such as apathy, indifference and disengagement. Too many Americans suffer from not being a part of something larger than themselves. One of the contributors to the frenzy of our presidential elections is that too many of us see the president as the person who “runs” the country. In reality, the president could just as easily be a cardboard cut-out that is trotted out for photo opportunities. It is not likely you are going to have a beer with O’Bama (unless you are a hypersensitive Harvard professor). I am more confident that we actually landed men on the moon than I am that O’Bama is a real person. But, I know for a fact that the mayor of Roanoke is real. The same for my county commissioner, the high sheriff, the county probate judge. I have looked each in the eyes and shared thoughts and idea, concerns and aspirations. What unites me to them is this place. Yes, O’Bama is a US citizen (assuming he exists at all) but so are 300 million others. Place is being “writ large” as we used to say in the State Department but place is actually intimate and personal. I can’t take responsibility for the United States. I can’t take responsibility for the State of Alabama. But I can take responsibility for Welch. I can be a good neighbor. I can work with them to make all of our lives better.

Well, that is what I feel about Joplin. It is the crystallization of place matters. Even though I don’t live or work there anymore, once I did and was a part of that community. It felt good. I know Joplin will rebuild businesses and houses. Those were all material things that were lost. What was not lost was that deep and abiding sense of place. That is why Joplin will be fine.