Fuming Over Hurricane Harvey (Long)
I walked outside to a warm, sunny day that rarely makes an appearance in SF. The Indian summer was here and the city celebrated shamelessly. Tank tops and summer dresses replaced NorthFace and Patagonia, the parks filled with sun tanners and day drinkers. It was wonderful to be alive. If San Francisco stayed this way throughout the year, it would be the best place to live in the world.
And yet, I had a strange gnawing feeling, like when I used to ignore bills or homework when I was younger. Something was not right. Yesterday, Nazi protesters, emboldened by Trump tried to hold a rally, on Crissy Field, a site of a national cemetery from World War II.
Today, as San Francisco built steam for the best 2 months of the year, Houston, lay practically underwater. Hurricane Harvey built into a stage 4 natural disaster over the Mexican gulf and crashed into Texas like something out of a sci fi movie. Highways were submerged under 15 feet of water in what a friend and Houston native said, “I’ve never seen anything like this before”.
You could donate for Harvey through red cross by texting something to a provider phone number (charge would appear on your phone bill). It was a no brainer. I posted something on FB suggesting that weekend hangover karma is best replenished by a small donation. A few people followed.
Houston felt so far away. I had a friend on the ground floor text me vivid descriptions of the disaster along with photos and numbers. And yet it was so easy to get back to worrying about me. The slight hangover, the upcoming to do list at work. How would I manage my vacation time and what girl should I go on a date with.
In fact, I felt quite accomplished (and in some sense was) by donating a few bucks and venting on Facebook for a few lines about a good cause (then checking for likes and comments every 30 seconds) . If all my friends did the same - we would have raised thousands. Not too shabby considering an average American family has $12k in savings.
The sensory overload doesn’t help either. Crazy headlines every day, dilute the rage value of any one individual transgressions. And why should I care that I was running around a sunny park with beer duct taped to my hands (to celebrate a friend’s engagement), while somewhere else in the world things were bad.
Something terrible is always happening somewhere. Usually no one knows about it. Your job is to not have your family there. Americans almost by definition and to a fault, place individual choice, ability and luck above anything that the government should provide for those in need. Was my likely an unsustainable rage and drive to make a difference on par for the course?
In my opinion people become fat and lazy in times with no struggle. It's probably the most Russian thing I’ve ever said. But imagine, someone my age working in sales for a cushy territory in Salesforce (your product has no competition and people need it, so you always get your bonus). You’re financially very well off, generally healthy and have quite a social circle considering you work for Salesforce and are almost by definition outgoing.
For one, that probably means that you will stress out about small things, like parking and where to go over labor day weekend. Second, you probably don’t have to solve actual problems very often, so you become very very complacent, routine based and effectively asleep at the wheel.
A valid counterpoint would be that things like getting married and building a household is very important and it’s true, but in some sense this constant setting up for the future is a bullet train to our most common destination and avoids hard choices, or real challenges in the present.
You could also say, that people struggle from an unnecessary amount of stress from things that shouldn’t be a big deal. But I doubt the numbers would actually add up considering a Gaussian distribution.
The thought process reminded me of last Christmas when Andy and I scraped together a text message system that prompted you to donate through SMS when notified by central command. It was clunky but actually worked, with 0 zero code. The hackathon was inspired by the recent Trump election. All the coastal snowflakes were shocked and willing to open up their wallets for change.
The idea fizzled out because given how easy it was to build and how hard it would be to get people to donate, consistently, it appeared to be a function best utilized (and easily built) by Facebook rather than a stand alone business. Facebook actually built the functionality a few months later.
And yet a vestige remained. It came back kicking and screaming when I realized that the easiest way to do this would be to check a hundred names off my contact list and send them a “Donate $10 button”.
TechCrunch published someone building something similar 6 months later. It was not a groundbreaking idea by any means. That also tells me that too many people start something just to do so, without any concrete rationale for how it will make money, other than - lots of people will use it and then we’ll figure it out.
Why is it so hard to donate to nonprofits? I wonder if it’s because the institutions function similar orgs that grant scientific research. Highly limited resources doled out by a scraggly committee, often more concerned with their own names being mentioned as a co-author than actually driving scientific progress. If it takes 10 people half a day to figure out who should get $10k in an emergency like this, something is terribly wrong.
I’ve had a similar sinking feeling recently when selling software to an oil and gas giant. Nobody knew how to take a bite of our business, who should do it, who’s responsibility was it, but everyone was very concerned with how to make themselves look good the software was a hit.
