Published by the St. Louis American - August 31, 2025
We miss the point that the trauma is only within the body and the life of the individual person and what I’m worried about is the trauma has been experienced by the earth itself. There is a risk associated with place — places that are abandoned, places that are physically destroyed, places that don’t have basic infrastructure. … This was greatly exacerbated by the tornado. Unless we pay serious attention to that, … we will create communities at a higher risk for violence and if we continue to blame people, we will simply see an increase in carceral force and we will be overwhelmed in our social, mental and clinical care environments because we will keep trying to intervene at the individual, personal level. This is a communal reality … and we need to treat it as such.
It has been over 90 days since the tornado hit us with a vengeance. There is still no convening of political, civic, social and medical minds to develop a comprehensive plan. There remains no unified office to provide tornado victims with information and resources. Instead, responses are reactive and fragmented, undermining effective support.
As a community organizer and storyteller with public platforms, I believe my responsibility is not just to sound the alarm of looming catastrophes (political or natural), but to arm my community with information and strategies for survival and transformative changes. I’ve been obsessed with what the tornado brought to St. Louis.
The number of town halls on tornado recovery and the lack of substantive answers seem to be only adding to the trauma and frustration for victims. For the people still living in tents in their front yards or hassling with insurance companies, relief is not coming fast enough.
For those of us not directly burdened with tornado relief for our families, we have to be relentless advocates for — in Dr. Punch’s words — a communal response to the tornado. This means fighting for a long-term, integrated approach that addresses the persistent economic inequalities and racial disparities that plague our most vulnerable communities.
We must resist the approach to react to the saddest plight or the most vocal survivor. Given the piecemeal recovery efforts that are unfolding, there will be two rebuilt houses on a city block in isolation from a beloved community and the critical resources that come with it.
It has been over 90 days since the tornado hit us with a vengeance. There is still no convening of political, civic, social and medical minds to develop a comprehensive plan. There remains no unified office to provide tornado victims with information and resources. Instead, responses are reactive and fragmented, undermining effective support.
As the nation focuses on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, most coverage [was] the sanitized version that highlights a gentrified New Orleans and ignores the Mississippi Gulf towns. I doubt if accounts will show that with the displacement of thousands of African Americans, the Crescent City is now predominantly white.
Coverage will not boast of a school district that fired all 8,000 public school staffers after the hurricane in favor of charter schools and what this has meant for remaining neighborhoods and for the students of families who were permanently displaced. What is the backstory about residents who were violently separated from their familial and cultural roots, who lost homes, schools, businesses, and their places of worship?
St. Louis has a unique opportunity to embrace a communal response, which means building the infrastructure necessary for healthy and protected communities. We have a wealth of experience from other natural and man-made disasters to inform a successful and healthy recovery. To ignore them is at our own peril.
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