Jon Mooallem

Opinion
When the World Falls Apart, People Come Together

The Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 surprised everyone by showing that natural disasters can bring out more kindness than selfishness.

By Jon Mooallem


Because in the modern age, in ordinary circumstances, a lot of us increasingly keep to ourselves. After all, it’s become so very easy and convenient.

Watching the slow, menacing spread of a virus is altogether different from reacting to the obvious, instantaneous shock of a quake. For most of us, the danger of this unfolding disaster is still invisible and diffuse. And yet any resilient and successful response has to be rooted in the same profound feelings of interconnectedness that arose instantaneously in Anchorage, some pervasive and bracing obligation to one another and our collective safety.

Washing your hands, staying home when you’re sick, limiting travel, keeping yourself healthy, not touching your face — little of what we’re being told to do feels particularly heroic or world-changing, or nearly enough to satisfy an anxious mind. But for a lot of us, it is, in fact, the job that’s in front of us right now — the role that these disordered circumstances are calling each of us, at a minimum, to play.

There are, and will be more, situations where helping more directly becomes possible and necessary — especially if we’re not getting coherent leadership, or even honesty, from those in charge. But we can’t afford to feel that canceling a school band concert, or suspending a basketball season, is a withering retreat; we must see them as parts of an empowered, collaborative undertaking. We are coming together to keep our distance. If we want to stop our world from shaking, we need to find in even the tiniest of these acts the same meaning and immediacy, the same togetherness and purpose,—
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