On Misuse, Missed Opportunities and Just Dealing With It

In 1945, my grandfather (henceforth Opa) was drafted into the U.S. Army. At the time, he had been in college for electrical engineering for three years (having been declined when he turned 18 because of poor eyesight), but in his own words, “my draft board decided that the nation could no longer do without my service”. Anyway, you would think they would put him in the Army Signal Corps, but nope; he was filled in as a regular GI, never mind his engineering background. That was a disappointment, but he did get to use a different skill eventually. Opa is Austrian by birth and spoke fluent German, and through the good offices of a friend, he wound up as a language instructor for a group of soldiers in New Jersey.

It wasn’t what Opa had wanted, but he made the best of it and, I can only assume, did a damn good job of teaching a bunch of GIs how to speak basic German. But when that unit (minus Opa) was eventually sent overseas, their destination was... wait for it... the Pacific Ocean! Even though the U.S. had occupied Germany after the war, and could probably have used a few good German-speakers,  it was off to the not-very-German-speaking islands of the Far East. Sixty-six years later, my Opa is still pissed at the government about that.

My Opa got screwed. His skill-set, and that of his unit, went totally unused. He was frustrated, and who wouldn’t be? But when that happened, he had no choice but to shut up and do his new job, because that was what the Army expected of him. So he went to New Jersey, bitching all the way, and did the job they wanted. It wasn’t glamorous and it sure as hell didn’t use him properly, but it was service in its own way.

I can’t speak for all of FEMA Corps, but judging by what I’ve heard from friends across the South and the East Coast, there are quite a few frustrated people who aren’t getting to use the training we just spent six weeks receiving. Instead of being out among the rubble, talking to survivors and helping communities, we’re pushing papers and fixing databases. Traditional NCCC appealed to me because of its direct service, its reliance on hard labor whose effects you can see. You really have to do mental gymnastics to connect office work to the visceral sense of service so many of us are looking for.

Now, in my grandfather’s time, the response to being misused or underused by the guv’mint was to shut up and do your job. I think it’s a bit harder for FEMA Corps because we’ve been told we’re so incredibly special to date. All of our instructors, the higher-ups in our chains of command, the deputy head of FEMA and the head of the CNCS have told us how great we are and how important it is that we’re standing here, ready to serve. It’s easy to get an overlarge head that way. We find it harder to just deal with our circumstances because we expected better or more glamorous work, or just because we know we’re capable of so much more. A lot of people have come up with a lot of panaceas for this feeling—find ways to be excited about your job, know that you’re carving out a role for those who come after you, take lots of FEMA training courses and stay positive. Here’s my two cents: you just have to shut up and do your job. Or, in the more moderate language of today, you just have to deal with it. (I love and take after my Opa.)

Yes, it’s a challenge. Yes, it’s not what we wanted. But the work will come. If it doesn’t—if there are no natural or man-made disasters, nobody dies, no communities are wiped out, no lives overturned for the rest of our time as FEMA Corps Members—that would be goddamn fantastic. But we can be pretty damn sure that it will not. The work will come, be it in nine months or two weeks or tomorrow morning. If you go home now, if you drop out and your team gets deployed without you, you’re gonna miss out on doing the work you really want to. We’re putting in time now so we can do the awesome stuff later. It’s the FEMA equivalent of eating your vegetables before dessert. Our expectations were so high, after six weeks of training that seemed endless at times, for us to go out in the world and finally, finally get started--but there’s no work for us right now, so here we sit. It’s nobody’s fault, and FEMA is trying to accommodate us the best they can (at least as well as any employer can find work for a dozen unexpected interns). We just have to make the best of it and wait for now.

Normally, this is the part where I’d tie the post back to the opening analogy, but I’ve pretty much shot my bolt with that story. Here’s another one. Long ago, one of my cello teachers told me—and this is true—that it was much harder to play slow pieces than it was to play fast ones. “Any idiot can play fast pieces,” she may or may not have said (paraphrasing like crazy). “It takes time and patience to play the slow ones.”

 It’s easy to rush to the aid of a community. It’s hard to sit around and wait. But you know what? We can do that. Because we’re FEMA Corps and they didn’t hire a bunch of ordinary people to be a FEMA Corps. They hired a bunch of awesome people who are dedicated to doing whatever they have to to help others. If that means putting up and shutting up for awhile, that’s what we’ll do. It's not sexy, it's not as fulfilling as we'd like, but you just gotta go to New Jersey and do what you're told. It'll all pay off the day we get out in the field.