The ground keeps shaking.
At 10:33 AM Pacific on July 4th, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake hit Southern California. Today, July 5th, another at 8:19 PM, magnitude 7.1. Each was followed by plenty of aftershocks. Sitting far away in my Las Vegas office, the tremors were reduced but still quite noticeable.
They didn’t do any damage here, though I know they did near its epicenter. I hope for the best for those impacted.
A few hours after the first one, I went looking for news from the area. It wasn’t wholly catastrophic, but some people and property suffered fairly severe damage. They were already busy picking up the pieces.
I used to wonder why people rebuild and stay in places where disasters are more likely: earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes. I was born and raised in Las Vegas, where it just gets hot. It seemed extremely illogical to me.
Then I got offered my dream job, and I moved to a place like that. Where driving to work is choosing to risk your life daily for three months every year. I went anyways, because my dream awaited me there.
That’s why. Our dreams drive us, despite the hurdles and the discomforts. For some, our dreams are big and where we come from is small. For others, it’s not about the place we’re in, but the life we want to live there. The people we want to be with. The experiences we want to share with them.
We take calculated risks every day in pursuit of our dreams. The privilege to take big risks in pursuit of big dreams deserves to be earned through effort and planning: studying diligently to become a doctor, or responsibly saving money to start your own small business.
But we all live in conditions far too uncertain to treat basic needs such as food, water, shelter, and health as privileges. Without the financial stability to guarantee those necessities, the ground is too unstable for people to aspire to bigger dreams. They cannot risk what little they have to begin earning the privilege to take the big risks.
Like an unexpected seismological event, catastrophe can strike out of the blue. A car accident or a rent increase knocks them off balance, severing financial pipelines and leaving a person with invisible fault lines of trauma from which they may never recover.
Just as an earthquake never impacts only one person, the shock waves ripple out from these everyday catastrophes, shaking the ground under family, friends, relatives, and communities. Our country has toppled from its perch on the highest shelf partially because these tremors of economic instability crippled our number one advantage in the global marketplace: productivity.
None of this changes until we decide to build foundations under our society to withstand these quakes. Unfortunately, the power to make these changes lies mainly in the hands of those who can afford to live in earthquake-resistant penthouses.
But resistant doesn’t mean invulnerable. If their world shakes hard enough, they will have to surrender or run. If we stomp our feet in unison, we can break open the fault lines they built their penthouses on. And if they refuse to abdicate, we can keep stomping until their foundations crumble. Many feet can make the ground tremble for generations, if need be.
The ground keeps shaking.
