Part Two: Mutual Aid in North Carolina: How Asheville Has Come Together in the Wake of the Storm

Margaret reports on her trip down to Asheville North Carolina and all of the work she saw people doing down there to keep people safe during crisis. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that whenever there's bad stuff, there's good
stuff people trying to do good despite the bad. I'm
your house, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week's a little different.
But you probably noticed because most people don't start with
part two of something, But in case you do, this
week is different because it's just me. This week, I'm

(00:28):
talking about the mutual aid response to Hurricane Helen in
western North Carolina. And I'm talking about that because I
wanted to take a week off of researching history to
go down and try to talk to people on the
ground there and do whatever I could to help out
because I live there for a very long time. The
very first seed of this podcast was me in a
barn outside of North Carolina trying to explain to my

(00:50):
French friend why she should care about this one thing
that happened in anarchist history a long time ago, and
realizing that if I can convince her to care about it,
then hopefully we can figure out how to talk talk
about radical history and more interesting ways. And I was like,
I should do a podcast, And here we are. Years later,
I'm on two and a half years into this podcast
that some of you all listen to, and I'm really grateful,

(01:12):
but that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking
about history unless you count last week as history, which
you should because it's technically history. Where is it just
the past? I was learning the difference between history and
the past recently, but that's besides the point. And what
you all can tell is that I just drank a
bunch of sugar water. I thought it was just like
electrolyte mix, but I had a bunch of sugar in it.

(01:33):
And so I'm going to talk really fast, well or
more excitedly anyway. This week is the special week yet
still despite not being on Mike. Sophie is our producer
Hi Sophie, and Rory is our audio engineer Hi Rory.
And our theme music was written for us by on Woman.
I'd say pie on Woman, but I have no idea.

(01:54):
I think she listens to the show sometimes, but you know,
she doesn't have to for a job like the other
two people I mentioned. So where we last left the
people doing mutual aid in Ashville, They were doing mutual
aid in Nashville, and I had just shown up with
a van and started talking to people. There were and
probably still are two sort of informal economies running side

(02:18):
by side right now in Asheville, North Carolina. Both come
from a good place. There's a free economy and a
cheap economy. Like there's like needs wants boards, for example,
up on the outside of Firestorm, there's a big old
chunk of cardboard and lots of markers around, and people
are writing what they need and want, people where wellness

(02:39):
checks need to get done, and what people have on
offer and all those things right, And some people are
writing down things like generator available for sale. It cost
me six hundred, I'm willing to sell it for two
hundred and fifty. Other people are donating generators. I've got
a bias towards the latter, especially since I donated my
own generator. But I also can't blame someone who wants

(03:02):
to not fuck themselves financially, because the financial impacts of
capitalism will probably in the end be worse for the
community than the floodwaters themselves. Easier for me to donate
an extra generator because I didn't live in the flood.
There was a group of activists. I think they all
met through school, not entirely certain who was gathering up
all the donated gas cans they could, And they were

(03:24):
just driving back and forth two runs a day, the
three hour round trip to Shelby, North Carolina, to fill
up on gas. Then they would come back. They would
park across the street from Firestorm and fill up anyone's
tank who needed it for free. They were prioritizing those
driving around mutual aid supplies, but they weren't strict about that,
and no one was like selfishly taking advantage of it.

(03:45):
I actually saw no one get their entire gas tank filled,
even though that was being offered anybody. While I was
talking to them, a man walked up and asked if
he could buy gas. So he's like, coming from the
different economies, coming from the cash economy, that's kind of
growing up too, oh right, And they told him he
could have the gas for free. He asked if he
could buy one of the gas cans. They told him

(04:07):
that he could have the gas, but they needed the can.
The man was not rude about this at all. He
in the end, he only took the tiniest bit of gas,
just enough to get himself to where he desperately needed
to go and donated far more money than he would
have paid if he'd bought the gas instead. Two folks
from the south Side Community Farm showed up for a
refill too, and I talked to them for a while.

(04:30):
The black community in Asheville has been and this will
not shock anyone to hear, both been historically mistreated and
segregated away from the rest of the city and also
among the hardest hit by the storm because the black
community has been pushed out by gentrification over the decades
into like sort of physically more dangerous areas, physically more
disaster prone areas. The south Side Community Farm's motto on

(04:54):
its website is growing Black food Sovereignty, and of course
the farm itself was under risk of losing their farm
plot even before the storm. For anyone wants to check
them out there Southside Communitygarden dot org, and they seem
worth supporting. In general, most of the city of Asheville
is accessible. Most of the isolated communities that we talk

(05:14):
about are the ones that have been cut off by
the storm out in rural areas, but some of the
black communities within Asheville were just as badly hit. Public
transit has been disrupted, of course, and you know, these
places are often further away from downtown and things, and
also just physically more of the roads in and out
of these neighborhoods have been rendered inaccessible. Most of the

(05:36):
supplies are coming into downtown Asheville or West Asheville. I
mostly hung out near Haywood Street in West Ashville because
that's mostly where I hung out when I lived there.
One of the main tasks in front of mutual laid
workers that they're working on. It's not perfect, they're working
on it. It's distributing supplies out from these central locations
to the harder to access places or the places that

(05:57):
are more likely to be forgotten. The response from businesses
has been well mixed. Already infamous is that six employees
of Impact Plastics in Tennessee died after being told that
if they didn't report to work in the storm, they
would be fired. Rumors on the ground in Asheville, which
I haven't been able to confirm yet, include things like

(06:19):
one neighbor I talked to said some delivery drivers for
Ingles were told that they had to drive that day
and they died, or that Ingles, which is a large
grocery store chain in the area refused to give the
food away that was going to be lost when the
power went out from like their fridges and freezers and shit,
there's not a lot of ingles love going on, is
what I'm getting at from multiple different groups that I

(06:39):
talked to. Meanwhile, I waited alongside about ten or fifteen
other vehicles behind in Aldis, which is another large chain
grocery store, while employees brought us palette after palette of
produce and other goods that were going to go bad.
We loaded up our vehicles and drove out to the
various distribution centers where other drivers were to take the
produce the last mile. I recruited one of my best

(07:02):
friends to basically become my handler while I was there.
They've been doing relief work with Mutual ad disaster relief
for years, and we drove around the city and the
surrounding areas, dropping stuff off and talking to folks, and honestly,
even above driving stuff around, I think that one of
the main things that I've been able to do is
literally just connect people because of my public presence. It'll

(07:24):
be like people on Twitter, you know, messaging me, or
I guess adding me. I don't have my dms open
on Twitter because that was a nightmare because I'm trans
but you know, messaging me and letting me know what
they have to offer, what they need, and trying to
get that in touch with people. And that's also what
my friend on the ground was doing. You know. That's
also so much of the work as we're driving around

(07:44):
delivering these supplies. Some of it is delivering supplies and
a lot of it is just talking to people. A
lot of it is saying like, what's going on here? Right?
Because these informal networks without central command, that's how they work,
and they work really well. And wherever we went, there
were people ready to help load or unload the vehicle,

(08:05):
and there were folks happy to talk, folks happy to
meet my poor overstimulated dog. It's currently quite happily napping
at my feet. I don't normally sug just bringing dogs
into these crises. I just live alone, and also was
set up to be self sufficient, and so I had
no other choice. And that friend of mine who was
driving around with was excited for the canned water. It's

(08:27):
apparently a thing in disaster relief circles. This like canned water.
This is unlabeled water. And beer cans, and it's water
that tastes a little beery. It doesn't have beer in it,
but it's like water that is perfectly potable, but is
like part of the process of making stuff. As my
friend explained it, breweries have an awful lot of distilled

(08:48):
water around in their tanks for the beer making process,
and when supplies are needed, they can just can up
that water and drop it off at mutual aid hubs.
The best breweries I don't put their name or logo
on the cans when they do it because they're not
doing it for clout. They're doing it to help people.
So ironically, I don't actually know who directly to thank

(09:10):
for the canned water that I drink. I'm guessing it
was from Pisca Brewery, but if it was someone else,
you're cool too. It was an interesting echo of when
only a few years ago in twenty twenty, when I
was living in Asheville, the distilleries turned their equipment to
make hand sanitizer to give it away. The small business
community in Asheville was out in force for relief. Restaurant

(09:33):
after restaurant was providing hot meals. Some places sold things
as cheap as they could without losing their shirts, you know,
like a quarter of their price or whatever. Other places
just accepted that they were going to lose their shirts
and gave everything away. At one point, I was waiting
outside my friend's house while the van was loaded with supplies.
Asheville is a strange place geographically, class wise, just just

(09:58):
an interesting place. There are all these streets where kind
of regular old vinyl sighted houses that have been around
since at least the eighties or nineties or whatever are
right next to these cube shaped modern houses. And these
cube shaped modern houses are often built on stilts because
they're built in the wash where there's not actually land
right or it's just a direct, crazy steep angle, so

(10:19):
they're built on stilts. And these houses seem to me,
and I could be absolutely wrong, they seem bougier to me.
I don't know if they are, but my friend calls
them Frank Lloyd wrong because they're kind of ugly. And
I'm not even like anti modernist stuff. I just honestly,
if I didn't think they were like a weird, gentrifying thing,
I might not think they were ugly. I don't know.

(10:40):
The class is complicated, but the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses
are around, and my friends live on a street like
that where there's, you know, some of the older houses
that are on land. And then Frank Loyd Wrongs on
stilts and a hatchback stopped in the middle of the
street where we were hanging out in the front yard.
A man got out and shouted water, and it took

(11:01):
us a while to sort out his meaning. He was
making sure we had enough water. He then asked about
each of the other houses in turn and didn't leave
until he'd satisfied himself that everyone had water, and he
introduced himself. He was actually a neighbor. He lived in
one of the cube houses on stilts. He didn't want
to approach us and come hang out and be friendly.
But I don't really blame him. We're a bunch of

(11:22):
subcultural folks wearing all black, and many of the people
I was hanging out with were the neighbors he'd never
actually met since he'd moved into the neighborhood. I would
be nervous if I was him too, And this interaction
stands out in my mind as a really positive one.
I ought to be really clear, this man did nothing wrong.
This man is amazing I like him, pro this man.
This interaction stands out in my mind because we don't

(11:43):
actually have to like each other to help each other out,
you know. Elsewhere, of course, I saw subcultural lines break
down fast at another friend's house. I talked for about
a half an hour with a seventy year old couple
who lived behind that house, like in a different house,
who are grateful that one of the watercubes from my
basement in West Virginia had wound up on their porch

(12:04):
because my friend knew they might need it. We talked
about the dry toilet situation, and they explained that growing
up around there, their own parents and our grandparents have
been used to outhouses anyway. And that's why we're proud
to announce our newest sponsor, shitting in a bucket. That's right.
If you're listening to this, feel free to try shitting
in a bucket. Uh. But you gotta do it like

(12:26):
the right way. You got to use saw dust. You
got to either compost it real good or throw it away. Honestly,
it's like you need more information than is available in
this ad for shitting in a bucket. Here's some other.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
Ads, and we're back and we're talking about toilets.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
That's what everyone listens to podcasts to hear about. They've
all want to hear about poop. There are a lot
of problems when the water goes out in the city,
most notably, of course, the fact that you need to
drink water in order to be alive. But we also
use water, an awful lot of water to flush our toilets.
The folks from Southside Community Farm had been going door

(13:08):
to door teaching people how to bucket flush, where you
dump water directly into the bowl of the toilet to
force it to flush, and you can use non podable
water to do it. That's like the upside to the
fact that it takes a ton of water. One friend
of mine, while the storm was still going on, ran
around the house and cut all the down spout gutters
or the down spout spouts, I don't know if they're

(13:30):
still called gutters when they're the down spouts whatever, and
set up trash cans underneath them all which left their
house with hundreds of gallons of toilet flush water. That
has saved their asses. If you'll part in the pun.
I talked with a woman named Lark from the band
Holler and Crow, who was set up outside Firestorm teaching
people how to make and use dry toilets. And you'll
notice this is like one of the only names I've used,

(13:52):
and that's because I've mostly been leaving everyone's names out
of my writing, because that's like a default in the
activist circles that I'm part of. And I'm still readjusting
to journalism times because I mostly forgot to ask people
if they wanted their names on the record or not.
There's a funny tension here because a lot of activists
specifically don't want to be mentioned by name, but a
lot of people, for good reason, are looking for recognition

(14:15):
for the work that they're doing and don't want to
be left out of the story, especially groups and individuals
were traditionally left out of stories. I'm from an activist background,
so I default to not naming people. For anyone who's
work I've left uncredited, I'm quite sorry. So Lark has
set up outside Firestorm with a few dry toilets. These
are five gallon buckets with pipe insulation for a seat

(14:36):
and sawdust at the bottom. Normally you'd use these as
composting toilets, but for emergency use you just use trash
bags to collect the poop. The idea is that you
don't pee into them, You just poop, and then you
cover the poop with sawdust. You pee outside. In most
of these situations it sounds sort of gross, but honestly,
shitting in a bucket it's not too bad at all.

(14:59):
This was my primary toilet for years when I lived
off grid and done right. They actually don't really smell.
You have to cover them. But Lark printed up instructions
in English and Spanish to distribute. She figured she'd pass
out maybe four or so of these toilets. When I
talked to her two hours in, she'd given away around twenty,
which was more than she'd brought with her. Because people

(15:21):
had seen what she was doing and thought I can
help with that, and they brought her buckets and pipe insulation.
One man who owned a sawmill had already been driving
around town with trash bags full of sawdust, thinking I
bet someone needs these for composting toilets.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
He was right.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Meanwhile, in the parking lot behind Firestorm, two groups, the
Asheville Tool Library and Western North Carolina Repair Cafe, had
teamed up to fix generators and chainsaws every time they
got one running, people would cheer, and then it would
go out into the field where the generators could keep
refrigerators full of meds cold, and the chainsaws could free
people trapped by down trees. And there's like three or

(16:00):
four mechanics working at any given point on these different ones.
You know. I brought my own backup generator down, the
one I'd used when I'd lived in a cabin and
the winter days had been too short for my solar array.
I hadn't run it in three years, and Okay, I
sort of hate small engines. They're so fussy and I
don't understand them. And I was like, oh, I left

(16:22):
this for three years. It probably doesn't work anymore. I
don't know. It's a weird thing to say you hate
small engines. But in my personal life, I tend to
run solar generators as my first backup choice, and I
use an electric chainsaw because I'm only taking down the
occasional tree, not doing like arborist work day in and
day out, things that need oil changes and use chokes
and rip chords. They're finicky and confusing and they scare me.

(16:43):
So I had literally no idea. I had no idea
whether my generator worked, and I actually thought it was
sort of like a dick move to bring down a
generator without bringing everything it needed to be immediately put
into the field. And in a lot of situations that
would be true. Right if there was like only one
group doing this work and you show up and like
I brought you a broken thing, that's like not great, right,

(17:05):
But I had forgotten. Ashville is full of people. People
are resourceful. Also, it turns out my generator was fine.
They just put gas in it and it ran, So
I guess that's good. Watching people do what they were
good at in the service of saving lives was sort
of magical. All of everything I saw was magical, to

(17:25):
be clear, Maybe the repair station wasn't even like extra magical,
But I just I love a world in which there
are people who like fixing things and who will fix
things because there's things that need fixing, and that is
the world we live in. I love the world we
live in. I did a supply run drop to the
Asheville Tool Library itself, which is just outside of town. Well,

(17:47):
I guess it's technically within the city limits, but it's
like rural area greenhouse land because They were collecting bar
and chain oil there and also tarps and ppe and
I had a bunch of that stuff and it's gonna
be one hell of a long cleanup. I talked to
the sculptor there who was sorting gear and getting it
ready to go out with the various crews. We also
drove up to Marshall, which is a smaller town about

(18:07):
thirty minutes north of the city. There we saw what
we'd been seeing everywhere, named groups using their infrastructure and
then melting into one another. The Harm Reduction group up there,
which distributes safe use supplies to the rural community, teamed
up with a group called ROAR, which stands for Rural
Organizing and Resilience and this is a rural mutual aid organization.

(18:30):
Their storefront, the Harm Reduction storefront, was now a relief center.
They talked to their landlord at the Strip Mall, who
I believe for free opened up another one of the
empty storefronts for them to expand into. Because Marshall became
a node reaching out further into the county. A group
of rural punks unloaded supplies from the van, a lot
of diapers and wet wipes and stuff like that, if

(18:52):
I remember correctly, and we hung out for a while
so that Rentraw my dog could run around and not
be over stimulated by the people on the cars of
the city. Several families came in to gather what they
needed and take it out to people while we were there,
and a pickup truck full of donations arrived and it
was unloaded and sorted. One of my friends from RORA
was there, and I've known him almost twenty years. I've

(19:15):
been working with him on anarchist projects off and on
the whole time he was busy, but we talked briefly
about how well it's just fucking cool to realize that
so many of us from the early aughts are still here,
still doing things, still trying to make the world better
however the fuck we can. And for him it's organizing
his rural community. And I don't have a clever AD transition.

(19:38):
I'm sorry. I know that's usually the thing I'm best at,
but I don't have one. I just have a regular
AD transition, which is where talking gets interrupted by ads.
Now and we're back. I remember talking to someone from

(19:59):
RH few years back about their work. One of the
main things that they do normally is that they get
firewood to people who heat their homes with wood and
don't have the resources or often the physical strength anymore
to go pick it up themselves. Rural communities do tend
to be older than city communities, and one thing that
Roor noticed is that it wasn't just progressives and activists

(20:23):
and stuff who were down to help out. A man
with a pickup truck and a trailer wants to be useful,
whether he voted blue or red or refuses to vote
at all. And I'm not trying to like say me samey.
I understand that there's like serious political divisions and that
those do impact our lives. I'm a trans woman living
in a rural area. I'm very aware of this, but

(20:44):
there's still the desire to be useful. I think about
the pickup truck a lot. It's not my Roman empire.
I probably only think about it like once every couple
of months, but I think real deeply about pickup trucks.
When I do, I mean I also think about the
because I drive one. From the outside, sometimes people see
and sometimes from the you know, lots of people, including

(21:06):
pickup truck drivers, see them as sort of these big
phallic symbols of exaggerated masculinity. But I remember one time
someone asked me what non toxic masculinity looked like to me,
and I actually wound up thinking about some of the
people I know and their trucks. People drive trucks because
they're symbols of self reliance, and even more so because

(21:27):
they believe that they can be useful if they have
tools to be useful with. Someone carrying a recovery strap
in their pickup truck isn't carrying it for themselves. They're
carrying it so that they can tow a car out
of a ditch, so that they can be useful. We
talk all the time on this show, especially recently since
the last week's episodes were about it. In this week's

(21:48):
episodes about it, we talk all the time about disaster compassion.
And when you talk about disaster compassion, people often say, yeah,
but that can't last past the disaster. It could. How
do I know that? Because RAR knows that people will
donate their time with their pickup trucks to haul wood
for their neighbors, because people will pull people out of ditches,

(22:11):
because we're fucking hardwired to help anyway. Pickup truck tangent Aside,
the people in Marshall itself ironically got power, were stored sooner,
and since so many of the people there are on wells,
they have more reliable access to water. While we were there,
they were discussing how to get water relief into the city,

(22:31):
mutual aid being famously mutual. Unfortunately, since I left last
Thursday morning, it's come out that the level of toxins
in the water downstream, which is north of Ashville, the
level of toxins is terrifyingly high due to plastic chemical spills,
and people in Marshall are likely to be going through

(22:51):
something an awful lot worse than initially expected. This is
still in the rumor stage as I record this, but
I'm hearing about relief workers with rat and worse and
serious ppe is needed in the area. Another sort of
rumor has been floating around since the start of the crisis,
rumors that hopefully will know more about soon, Rumors of

(23:12):
law enforcement interfering with relief efforts. I expect I'll be
returning to this subject as I understand more about it.
But to be clear, the government is not a monolithic entity. Local, state,
and federal are all different. There are different departments within
each of those, and each department is staffed by people
who are famously different from one another. There has absolutely

(23:37):
been a lot that various government agencies have been doing
that is useful. There are radio broadcasts of information that
have been going out constantly. There are places for people
to fill their own water containers. The government is set
up a refugee camp essentially. I've heard FEMA, which actually
in the end is more of an insurance company than
an actual disaster response organization, is working to get people

(23:58):
some monetary relief, although I understand why. We also people
are very madahema about all of that because there's an
enormous meta red tape and it sounds like the whole
thing isn't going to be as funded as is expected.
And again, this is not a current events podcast, and
that's stuff that's coming out now. Fire stations are collecting
and distributing gear. Official city workers are often handling the

(24:19):
most dangerous chainsaw tasks, like specifically chainsawing the trees entangled
with power lines, and the lines between official and informal
relief are often blurred. And we can and should be
friends whenever possible. A mutual aid disaster really friend of
mine made coffee for the chainsaw crew on their street
working at night to yeah clear a tree tangled up

(24:40):
in power lines. People from various organizations are sharing supplies
with one another wherever it's necessary, including going from government
to informal or formal NGO to informal or vice versa.
You know, the emergency declaration that allows doctors to be
doctors in informal settings, or allows pharmacies to refoe prescriptions
without prescription forms are life saving things that the government

(25:04):
is sort of doing now. Granted they're kind of like,
is not enforcing a thing really count as doing a thing?
I don't know whatever. While I was there, though, there
were constant rumors about roadblocks being set up by the
government to prevent resources from going where they needed to go,
or attempting to requisition disaster supplies and to centralized official locations,

(25:24):
which are famously really bad at getting things out that
last mile and figuring out where things actually need to go.
On the condition of anonymity, I spoke with a female
worker about this. They told me, in essence that while
a lot of the long term disaster relief staff come
from community organizing backgrounds a greater percentage of the immediate
disaster response. People who are interested in the shorter deployments

(25:47):
are like military and law enforcement types who struggle to
see something seemingly structuralist and have an intense desire to
impose structure upon it, which is to say, to move
into sort of an enforcement mode. Some of the rumors
of roadblocks have proven to be exaggerated, but not all
of them. I can point to three things like that

(26:08):
that I have more information about right now, and again
I suspect we'll know more by the time you're listening
to this. That's why I normally stick with history. Hell,
that's why I used to start with only doing history
of where no one in the story is alive anymore.
But eventually I moved into the more recent history. Here
we are, what's next? Am I going to do future episodes?
Who knows? Okay, the stories that I know a little

(26:32):
bit more about. I know that cops pulled over a
vehicle headed into one small town earlier in the week
to tell them that the town was closed to traffic.
When the people in the car explained that it was
full of diapers and other supplies, the cop let them through.
That's the nicest interaction I know of like that. Another
well publicized cases of a helicopter pilot who went to
go rescue people and was told he'd be arrested if

(26:53):
he flew into the area again. I've heard rumors on
the ground that other pilots have been welcomed with open
arms by local officials and they've promised a clear airspace
for them. I've also heard from a tractor trailer of
supplies that was pulled over on the interstate and the
cops essentially said, you can either turn around or let
us take all that stuff to our distribution center, and
the tractor trailer turned around. I'm assuming they found another

(27:15):
route in cops are famous for highway robbery. Of course,
it's called civil asset forfeiture, so it doesn't surprise me
at all. There are also rumors of regular highway robbery,
and some of these seem to be corroborated. It seems
very likely that a tractor trailer full of supplies on forty,
where they were sleeping in their truck, as people and

(27:37):
trucks often do, was robbed at gunpoint, and people took
all of the supplies that fit into their car. That
is the only corroborated thing like that I've personally seen.
There are a lot of rumors going around about wild
looting and things like that, And first of all, I
don't have a problem with people breaking into stores to
take what they need when it's that or starve. That

(27:59):
doesn't bother me at all, especially if people then redistribute
those things where they need to go. I love living
in a society where we all love robin hood and
yet pretend like looting and disaster situations is wrong. I mean,
even in disaster movies the heroes do it. What's wrong
with you people? Anyway, It's still not nice to rob
people at gunpoint for the supplies that they're driving into
the city. But these rumors of looting, it's possible that

(28:22):
a couple people looted or were arrested looting, they seem
to be greatly exaggerated. Even again, I'm hearing this on hearsay,
but even the local law enforcement when sort of asked
about it, were like, Nah, that's just like not really happening.
That's like more of like the Facebook madness that happens
where people are posting like Ashville's gone into crazy mode.

(28:42):
The purple hair freaks are killing everyone, and there's all
these rumors about people burning their houses down while they're gone,
and just fucking bullshit. It's just all fucking bullshit. That's
besides the point where were we It's possible, even likely
that official channels will slowly get their shit together and

(29:03):
start essentially trying to strong arm the competition out of
the business of helping people. One small town restaurant posted
a Facebook that it was told to shut down its
free distribution center to get back to the business of
selling things in order to bolster the local economy and
let the cops handle the relief work. And that's the
whole twisted end of it, isn't it. We actually genuinely

(29:27):
could build a society based on mutual aid and solidarity.
Many such societies have existed throughout history, and they pop
up naturally every single time something goes wrong. It's what
we want to do. And what's funny is they don't
look good on paper, they look good in person. There

(29:47):
was a carnival air to Asheville while I was there,
which is a bit tragic and strange, and some people
feel intensely alienated by that Carnival air especially the people
who are suffering, or are isolated, or just lost loved ones,
or have no fucking clue how they're going to pay
their rent now that their job is closed indefinitely. But
still there are a lot of smiles on a lot

(30:08):
of people's faces, because giving each other things feels good.
That's the core of it. That's the lesson I learned
from Rebecca Soulnett by way of all my friends who've
read her books. That's the lesson I've learned from the
random Soviet era beggar by way of a strange biography.
We feel good when we help each other. We can

(30:32):
help each other more, but the state and capitalism wants
us to get back to the business of selling things,
back to paying rent, and back to waiting around to
die in the next disaster. I don't want to paint
a rosy picture. I didn't go toward the devastation. I
didn't work with a chainsaw crew or an ATV crew

(30:54):
to get supplies into the worst areas on our signal loops.
There are constant messages of worry and fear, and the
need is intense and ongoing. People need help. If you're
in western North Carolina, make sure you have what you
need personally, and then go see about helping others. If
you're within a day's driver or so, there might be
hubs being set up to collect supplies to get them

(31:16):
to Ashville. Work with a supply hub rather than assuming
the best thing to do is go beyond the ground.
Asheville doesn't lack people at lacks supplies. Help move supplies
towards Asheville wherever you are, but also look into what's
needed instead of just sending old sweaters or whatever. If
you do expect to go into Ashville bringing supplies, do
so connected with a group and expect to be self sufficient.

(31:37):
If you're coming for a day, make sure you have
five days of food and water with you. But for
most people, the best way to help is to donate.
There are a lot of groups worth donating to, too
many to easily collate here, and the needs EBB and flow,
and who knows when you're listening to this, So I'll
say two groups that I've either donated to or worked with,
and they are Asheville Medical Solidarity and Mutual Aid Dissease

(32:00):
US for Relief. Donate to them. Thank you for listening
to this extra strange episode of Cool People Who Did
Cool Stuff. Thank you listeners for providing me a job
that's flexible enough that I was able to take a
week off to go help my friends. And thanks for
taking care of each other. Oh, and if there's a
second lesson here, Store a week's worth of water and

(32:20):
food in your house, keep at least half a tank
of gas in your car at all times, and go
introduce yourself to your neighbors.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. A more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
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