A Full Circle

“A Full Circle”  

By Jim Mullen

A Full Circle

NOTE: An excerpt from my September 25, 2004, speech to the Central United States Earthquake Consortium (CUSEC) as a new state director: a different yet eerily similar time, it seems applicable once again as FEMA endures an overhaul of its mission with little regard for the consequences to public safety. 

“Two movies I have seen recently suggest a couple of directions federal emergency management might be headed – I hope I am wrong. In OFFICE SPACE, a character named Milton’s work station keeps getting moved to obscure sections of the office, until his company realizes that they had intended to lay him off years before – due to an administrative glitch he remained on the payroll. Instead of admitting their mistake, they moved him to the basement, hoping he would get the idea and just leave on his own. That resulted in catastrophe for the company (angry, frustrated, he torched the company’s offices!). Hopefully FEMA, while far from the upper floors of DHS, will manage to stay out of the federal basement. But it could be even worse, as in the perfectly silly movie “10.5” when officials allowed FEMA’s Director to be lowered 325 feet below the earth’s surface to manually detonate a nuclear device that would keep California from separation from the North American continent! (Note: from a purely, political perspective – would the Bush Administration even want to reverse that process?). Sometimes art does imitate life – but the nation would miss FEMA whether it was vaporized or merely stashed in the basement!

We can’t stop the bus by lying down in front of it, because the driver would just run over us. Misgivings aside, we need to get on the bus, shout advice over the roar of the engine – and perhaps influence course adjustments. Lighting a candle is preferable to cursing the darkness descending over emergency management these days.” (Note: In 2025, 21 years later – same as it ever was!).