Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

You know you inhabit a strange corner of the world when you turn up to the office to find a mass mailing from a place called, BioSeal Systems. “Open Now! Disaster Response Temporary Morgue Planning...Sample Enclosed.”

Sample enclosed?

I had to know more. I didn’t even take off my sunglasses. Just opened it right up. Appears to be some kind of sealing wrap for dead bodies, complete with portable heat-sealing equipment.

“The only human remains containment solution that can be stored for 49 years without deterioration in performance.” There is a picture of a very serious looking nurse, a doctor and and some guy in a suit standing over what appears to be a body—all wrapped up.

Now this is actually a real thing. I have been at conferences with entire tracks dedicated to the logistics of setting up morgues in disaster zones. It’s not an easy matter. The people on those tracks look cold sober, like they have shed every last delusion about the world.

But I guess I’m not there yet. I still haven’t opened the sample. Maybe after lunch.

Perhaps because of politicians like Democratic Congressman David Obey of Wisconsin, who last night convinced his fellow members of Congress to pass a bill that would snatch back money already promised to education reform incentives like the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition.

Why would Obey do such a thing? Particularly when his own state is gunning for Race to the Top funding? Wisconsin’s June 2010 application, signed by the state’s governor and superintendent, makes it clear that this money is vital to the kids in Obey’s state:

“The status quo is not acceptable. Race to the Top provides an unprecedented opportunity to expand successful state and local reform efforts to effect systemic change and increase education innovation. The State’s reform agenda will increase overall student achievement, close the achievement gaps, increase high school graduation rates, prepare students for college and careers, and build the capacity, human capital, to make the State’s reforms sustainable.”

So why would a Democratic congressman pull $800 million dollars away from a program that may turn out to be the most effective use of federal education funds in a generation? A program that is (relatively speaking) tiny, but has already incentivized more than a dozen states to change their laws and regulations and reform their schools before a single dime has been spent?

Obey says he wants this money to help bail out teachers whose jobs are in jeopardy due to the recession. But anyone who thinks this is about saving teachers’ jobs is being misled. Obey could get the money to protect teachers’ jobs elsewhere (Obama officials have given him specific alternative offsets within the budget to find this money.). He is just choosing not to. He has indicated before that he does not support reform efforts, and he is using the recession as an excuse to slow Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s momentum.

Let’s be clear. If Congress wants to save teachers’ jobs, they could do it a million different ways—including cutting existing budget fat like the $8.8 million Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners program (with thanks to Alyson Klein at Education Week):

That program “supports culturally based educational activities, internships, apprenticeship programs and exchanges for Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, children, and families of Massachusetts, and any federally recognized Indian tribe in Mississippi.”

To defend his actions, Obey likes to revert to gee-whiz metaphors: “When a ship is sinking, you don’t worry about redesigning a room, you worry about keeping it afloat.” Here’s the problem: this ship has been sinking for a very long time. It is not “afloat” for millions of kids around the country. For them, postponing teacher layoffs (which only imperil some 2-5% of teachers anyway) is like redesigning the room. Race to the Top is not perfect. But it is the closest thing we have to a life boat.

Two years ago, I wrote an essay in TIME about the radical genius of creating a cabinet-level position to manage volunteers in California, America’s Disaster Laboratory. Today, we have more big news coming out of the lab.

Secretary Karen Baker, the woman who got that job on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s cabinet, is introducing the nation’s first Disaster Corps—a squad of 1,000 elite, well-trained volunteers who can can be deployed to disaster sites as soon as they are needed (without waiting for the soul-killing bureaucratic sign-offs that so often delay volunteer efforts after big calamities.)

“We needed to develop the Navy Seals of volunteers,” Baker says. OK, first of all, it takes some chutzpah to put the words “Navy Seal” and “volunteer” in the same sentence. Baker can pull it off only because she has actual power—the kind almost none of her peers across the country can claim. When I greeted her as “Secretary Baker” on the phone the other day, she laughed and said, “Call me Karen, or I’ll kill you.” But she (and by association all volunteers in the state) have experienced a surge in credibility since she got the cabinet post. “All of a sudden all phone calls are returned,” she says. “Instantly.” (Seven months after Schwarzenegger created the cabinet post, Gov. David Paterson did the same thing in New York.)

For two years, Baker has worked on creating the Disaster Corps. “We needed to up the game,” she says. Why?  Because California is crowded with volunteers (one quarter of the population volunteers in some way.) But too few of them have the training, the experience, or, crucially, the trust of the authorities. “Everyone will say, ‘Yeah, we love volunteers.’ But the truth is, they don’t often use them because they don’t know what they’re getting.”

The new Disaster Corps will be made up of citizens who have received Department of Justice/FBI background checks and First Aid/CPR training, at a minimum. Many will have special skills (like language fluency or law enforcement experience) that make them particularly valuable for certain kinds of crises. They will be drawn from existing volunteer outfits like Citizen Corps, which means they will have worker’s compensation coverage already—an important pre-requisite for higher-risk disaster sites. The Corps will be supported by five local coordinators, full-time staffers in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and San Francisco counties.

The idea is to make it easier for the people in charge to find, trust and deploy volunteer assets when they need them. As part of the project, Baker’s office is also creating a large new database that everyone can access with critical information about which volunteers (from all organizations across the state, not just Disaster Corps) are available to do what. “Often in government, they know what the problems are but not what resources are available to them privately.” And Baker has set up mutual aid agreements so that volunteers can work across different counties. Not very sexy, but very important. All of this has been done with private and federal dollars, which is a good thing given that Baker’s state has no dollars.

So why did it take two years? “That was not what I’d expected,” she admits. “But we needed to get buy-in.” Baker held over 30 meetings throughout the state to convince people at the top (fire chiefs, police chiefs, emergency managers) and people at the bottom (volunteers who were used to the status quo) that Disaster Corps would be a good idea.  The Corps should be fully stood up by this fall. It will be interesting to watch what happens when disaster strikes, as it always does in California.

I talked to Nightline for this segment on heroism yesterday, and it reminded me of just how slippery the concept is. The show features Richard Camp, a man who was at his local bank when a gunman came in and tried to rob the place. The video from the surveillance cameras is pretty remarkable. You can see how Camp is trying to make up his mind: should he remain passive or should he try to stop the man? Meanwhile, watch what most of the other customers did: as the perpetrator, wearing a motorcycle helmet, waved his gun around, the other customers went about their business. One man sips his coffee while another couple fills out a loan application.

Now, it’s possible that some of them literally did not see or hear anything to suggest a problem. But I would guess that some of them were in a position to notice something amiss—and their brains talked them out of it. That is the most common mistake that people make in life-or-death situations. They are very slow to accept that something dangerous is happening. There are good reasons for this: the brain works by fitting everything that happens into patterns for what has happened before. So you will find yourself trying to normalize what you are seeing—to shoehorn it into one of the patterns in your head for what normally happens. We are slow to recognize exceptions.

Richard Camp did not have that luxury, since the man threatened him directly. And Camp did not get stuck in disbelief. As you can see in the segment, he waited several minutes, and then jumped the guy—sustaining a gunshot wound to the leg. Another customer then helped subdue the robber. Camp was declared a hero and is recovering from his injury.

Since then, lawyers have gotten involved, and Camp has filed suit against the bank. (See this Los Angeles Times piece for more.) I wish I could say this is uncommon, but it is not. Survivors often complain that the authorities tasked with protecting them—or at least thanking them—let them down in some way after the incident. And companies, also reeling from the initial crisis, frequently do not know how to best respond to the complicated needs of survivors. It is heartbreaking how quickly goodwill can evaporate.

Anyway, no one can say if the robber would have left the bank without firing his weapon had Camp not intervened. No one will know if the robber would’ve gone on to rob more banks and put more people in danger. But it seems like Camp thought through his options and decided to take responsibility for the safety of himself and others. I commend him for his courage.

President Obama’s Oval Office speech last night seemed familiar. As if a speech writer had called up the President’s stock al-Qaeda speeches and done a find-replace. Delete “enemy,” insert “oil.”

A side-by-side comparing last night’s battle lines to the battle lines used in speeches about, um, actual battles!

“But make no mistake: We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes.”—Oil Spill Address

“But make no mistake: This war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.” —State of the Union Address, Jan. 27, 2010

“We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused.  And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”—Oil Spill Address

“We are at war against al Qaeda…And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.”—Statement about Failed Christmas Day Bombing Attempt, Jan. 7, 2010

“[S]adly, no matter how effective our response is, there will be more oil and more damage before this siege is done.”—Oil Spill Address

“One year ago, much of Baghdad was under siege....Today…ordinary life is beginning to return.”—...Oops. This was actually President Bush. Back in 2007. Getting a bit harder to tell these guys apart.

I presume all this talk of a “battle plan” was meant to project strength. And it’s true that Americans love a good fight. But as much as we’d like to nuke the oil well, we all know that the oil is not, um, alive. Would that it were! We could perhaps negotiate.

Did the stress of 9/11 lead to a spike in miscarriages? In the months after the terrorist attacks, the death rate for male fetuses in the U.S. went up 12%, as detailed in a new study in the BMC Public Health Journal. The study (PDF is here) hypothesizes that the rise in miscarriages may have been caused by “communal bereavement”—which may have in turn disproportionately impacted males, who seem to be more sensitive to stress hormones in the womb.

People have speculated for decades about how major disasters impact fertility rates. The research is sparse but intriguing. A fascinating 2005 study, “Did Fertility Go up after the Oklahoma City Bombing? An Analysis of Births in Metropolitan Counties in Oklahoma,” determined that births did indeed rise after the Oklahoma City bombing. Why? Well, no one knows for sure, but the authors speculated that people’s priorities might have shifted after the trauma:

“[W]hen mortality becomes salient, people behave increasingly according to traditional values. Having children and raising families would be such a traditional response.”

Did a resurgence in family values happen after 9/11 as well? The BMC Public Health study does not analyze pregnancy rates. But it suggests that the attacks may have triggered a biological response not within women’s conscious control—a surge of stress hormones even in women not directly affected by the attacks.

In both cases, intense media coverage of the terrorist attacks magnified their emotional impact on the rest of the nation. It’s cosmic to think about what this means for the families and fetuses of the future. As media coverage of disasters becomes ever more immediate and vivid, can we expect even greater impact on fertility? Will we all be more affected, subliminally or not, by trauma we did not actually experience? Or will we develop a sort of numbness to the montage of oil spills, hurricane-force winds and devastation projected on our screens?

I’ve become almost numb to the stories about the end of serious print journalism—the lay-offs, the bureau closings, the disappearance of fact checkers, libraries and integrity. So it was strangely refreshing to read today about one budget cut that may make the world a better place and certainly makes common sense.

News outlets are cutting back on budgets for covering the President! Now, this is portrayed as terrible news by the New York Times, more evidence that the end of the world is near, etc. But I am not so sure.

I have dipped in and out of the Washington news gaggles for 14 years, and I can tell you that having a pack of 30 reporters following the President around in a chartered plane is not good journalism. I’ve never understood it. This is arguably the most expensive kind of reporting after war reporting, and yet it yields very little truly useful information.

And yet that is how it has been done for decades. All sorts of valuable reporting trips get cut before anyone dares mess with the tens of thousands of dollars that get spent every quarter on following (and photographing) the President. And why is this? Why do we need several dozen people running around after the President, writing down largely the same things?

It’s not because the reader needs this level of redundancy, I can tell you that. I have seen these packs, and it is not pretty. Basically, the reporters engage in a desperate and somewhat embarrassing battle to get one tiny shred of new information or “scene,” as it is called, out of a highly choreographed event that is being recorded, analyzed and Tweeted to death by their competitors. I have seen smart, otherwise sane daily beat reporters chase each other across parking lots to ask one more question of Barack Obama in the futile quest to get him to say something newsworthy that he has not already said a thousand times—to get him to make a mistake, in other words. There is rarely any time to talk to the real people who may attend these events.

But big news organizations consider this a prestige beat, one that they must do even after they’ve cut everything else. Witness the bizarre logic in this excerpt from the Times story today:

The skimping on charters started in the tail end of the George W. Bush administration and has deepened during Mr. Obama’s 16 months of office, particularly in the last three months, news executives say. In these cases — be they in Buffalo this month or in Prague, where Mr. Obama traveled last month without a press charter for an important nuclear arms deal — the only reporters who are in the so-called presidential bubble are the dozen in a travel pool that fly on Air Force One and take notes and pictures for the rest of the press corps.

What is wrong with having a dozenreporters shadowing the President? Why isn’t that enough?!

It reminds me of a quote in James Fallows’ thoughtful story on Google in the new Atlantic. He is interviewing Krishna Bharat, a Google executive who is perplexed by the redundancy in all news coverage, not just White House coverage:

“It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” [Bharat] asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” He said this was not a purely theoretical question. “I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

I suspect that the tradition of saturation White House coverage has more to do with reporters’ vanity and editors’ lack of imagination than with real news. The real news is happening wherever the President is not. Want to cover the oil spill? Go out on the boats of pissed-off fishermen cleaning up BP oil. Want to investigate the impact of the stimulus act? Go hang out with the construction workers drinking Red Bull on the side of the freeway. (Want to cover the President? Fine. Go on a trip every other month. The rest of the time, watch him live on your computer, read the pool reports, run the pool photos—and then go talk to your sources about what is really going on.)

Unfortunately, the money saved by cutting White House coverage will not now shift to enterprise reporting. It’s too late for that. It will go towards the bottom line at places where the bottom line is deep underwater. But that’s a mistake. Because there are important stories to be told, and they have almost never been located in a ballroom at a Holiday Inn surrounded by satellite trucks.

Check out Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York Times this week. He argues that Obama is missing a massive opportunity in the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico, and I think he is right.

“Sadly, President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination. So far, the Obama policy is: “Think small and carry a big stick.” He is rightly hammering the oil company executives. But he is offering no big strategy to end our oil addiction….Please don’t tell us that our role is just to hate BP or shop in Mississippi or wait for a commission to investigate. We know the problem, and Americans are ready to be enlisted for a solution.”

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill leaves us all, regardless of politics, with a pit in our stomachs—a sense that something awful is happening, and there is no satisfying way to place blame, much as we’d like to. The thick sludge washing up on the shores of Louisiana belongs to BP, but also to the rest of us. That’s why more than 5,000 people have submitted ideas to a suggestion box set up by BP and the Coast Guard for how to respond to the spill. That’s why people all over the world have sent hundreds of thousands of pounds of hair (yes! hair!) to help sop up the oil, even though it’s unclear how effective such containment booms will be.

As is the case in every disaster I have studied, the primary public reaction to catastrophe is positive and powerful: We urgently want to do something to help. The public wants to be part of a big solution—not a congressional inquisition. But we don’t know what to do.

We want to think big, to make changes, to sacrifice so that this doesn’t happen again—and yet. We are told to stay home and let the people in charge keep doing what they’re doing, however poorly they are doing it.

All that energy is draining away, just like it did after 9/11, slipping into a leadership void, dissipating until we are left feeling just helpless and fatalistic. And that poisonous combination of helplessness and fatalism does not end here. That attitude is, I promise you, the best way to guarantee more disasters of all kinds in the future.