My colleague at the office thinks that things will get much worse as the economy continues to collapse. I think we are on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Curiously, we’re both right.

Our conversation brought to mind a dream I read about years ago. At a tumultuous time in her life, a woman dreamed that she was free-falling through outer space and terrified. She landed on something. Feeling around, she realized it was the wing of a giant bird gliding through space. Watching the economy collapse is like living through Hurricane Katrina in slow motion. We will get through this but how is determined by our response.

New Orleans residents and impoverished Americans everywhere can testify that help isn’t coming soon enough. We would be better off learning from communities that have been devastated by greed and left to die. The Exxon Valdez 1989 oil spill blackened 10,000 square miles of ocean and 3,200 miles of pristine coastline near Cordova, Alaska. Last year, 20 years after the incident, the rightward-leaning Supreme Court reduced Exxon’s penalty from $5 billion to $507 million. Were they thinking poor Exxon? Exxon Mobil Corp. reported a 2008 profit of $45.2 billion, breaking its own record for a U.S. company, even though its fourth-quarter earnings fell 33 percent from the previous year.1

The rural community of Cordova is making a come back. The February 2009 issue of In These Times published Our Town vs. Exxon, an interview of Dr. Rikki Ott, Cordova resident:
After our fish runs collapsed, we had nothing more to lose. When you reach that point, it’s very freeing … you have only each other. You look around at people, your neighbors, and you say, “What are we going to do?” There were groups of people who sat down and started to talk with each other about the possible solutions, the changes we needed to make to our economy and in our own emotional lives…Out of that effort came “The Copper River Watershed Project” to support the growth of local fishery, sustainable forestry and tourism over 26,500 square miles, encompassing one of the last, intact watersheds in North America. Among many other goals, we sought to protect salmon and upriver habitat from widespread clear cutting.

Even Detroit is transforming. Detroit: City of Hope is an evolving communal vision that calls Detroit into a place where humanity lives with purpose and dignity.  As a collaborative organism, Detroit: City of Hope makes opportunity to see, to participate, to invigorate, to create the ground of peace where people find ways to share their highest selves. We see Detroit with our hearts as well as with our eyes.  It is through the shared intimacy of seeing hope and learning to walk together – beyond the constraints of deprivation, alienation, in-difference and distrust toward the place where hope lives and will not die, because we will not, can not, surrender – that we discover our connections as human beings.  Through our collective experience we evolve our testimony of Detroit that becomes a record for others to bear witness to how diverse people can see past madness into hope and healing.

The point of both stories is that the people in each community lost everything, muddled through many dark years and then pulled together. That’s when the shift from victim to survivor kicked in. Both Cordova and Detroit had to process their collective grief before coming out on the other side. We’ll have to work through our national and worldwide grief as we pick up the wreckage and pull together to move on.

1 Huffington Post, Exxon Mobil Reports