FEMA - A Wakeup Call

By Namaste Staff Writer

Helping out in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, both of which struck the Gulf Coast in late 2005, I watched the waste of public money happen. People who didn’t need help and had plenty of financial resources of their own received in some cases thousands of dollars, while others who needed help were left destitute.

FEMA awarded something like a billion dollars in improper payments to individuals, while spending almost another billion on 25,000 trailers that were unusable because they were not appropriate for flood zones. They also doled out $1.8 billion for hotel rooms and cruise ship cabins, providing temporary housing that cost more than permanent housing in apartments would have cost.

The French Quarter may be back in business after the biggest disaster in United States history, but more than a year and a half later, tens of thousands are housed in trailers, as homes stand empty, uninhabitable as a result of the flood waters—a testimony to the inefficiency of our response to this catastrophe.

Now we’re told that tons of food under the care of FEMA have had to be thrown out. Something like six million meals stockpiled in case of another disaster in 2006 spoiled because of inadequately equipped storage facilities. That’s more than $40 million on the garbage heap.

It does no good to scapegoat FEMA or other government agencies, however. Inefficiency and wastage of this kind are rife in not just government agencies but all kinds of organizations. If it isn’t FEMA that’s under fire, it’s the cost of tools or equipment bought by the military—or the millions skimmed off a charity, aid to overseas nations, or a corporate pension scheme.

We live in a society that is so often trying to bolt the door after the horse has escaped. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could avoid many of our problems in the first place?

The fact is, we could, if our focus shifted from judgment and blame to awakening people’s awareness and raising their consciousness.

Our world could be a very different place, in which there is little wastage, minimal inefficiency, and therefore a whole lot more of the needed resources for everyone on our planet. It’s not rocket science. It’s simply a matter of consciousness. When you become aware, problems are mostly quite easy to solve. As Michael Brown, a Namaste author, likes to say, Presence knows no order of difficulty.

Three book from Namaste Publishing especially home in on the absolute practicality of living consciously, instead of being driven by unconscious or external forces.

Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth examines the need of each and every one of us to become part of a planet-wide evolution in consciousness, and shows how this will transform both our individual lives our lives collectively as a species.

Eckhart goes beyond the insights of his earlier book The Power of Now, in an easy-to-read, moving book that invites us to envision the world as it could be—as, indeed, it must be if we are to survive. It is an extremely hopeful book, pointing to a rising consciousness that can transform the planet. It is also available in CD format, read by Eckhart.

Michael Brown’s The Presence Process is a practical, everyday guide to becoming a person who functions consciously. When we are conscious, we make responsible decisions, instead of making decisions reactively as we’ve seen with FEMA. How much grief we spare ourselves when we take the step of becoming conscious. Our choices then direct our lives down paths that are fulfilling, loving, and benign.

In Conscious Health, Ron Garner takes a sweeping look at how so much of our modern world is engineered to make us sick—from the food and water we put in our mouths, to the pricey protocols we use as we attempt to undo the damage we do to ourselves out of ignorance. This is one of the most helpful and practical books Namaste has published and has the potential to change your life.

Criticizing, blaming, castigating—we’re good at these. But humans have been indulging in judgment from time immemorial, only to repeat the saga of failure in one generation after another. Blaring headlines, unmasking the latest travesty, ultimately do nothing to bring about change. Awakening consciousness is the path to change.

There is something to be learned from FEMA’s inefficiency—the need for all of us, at every level of society, to begin functioning consciously instead of as cogs in a wheel.

It is impossible to become conscious as an individual and fail to have an impact on our fellow humans. As each of us faces up to how unaware we are much of the time, becoming increasingly awake in all that we do, we raise the consciousness of the whole planet.

It is time for us to take a global leap into conscious living.