CONCEPT: Emergency

Emergency: In addition to the conceptualization of an emergency given above in connection with the notion of Disaster, we can see an emergency as any out of the ordinary event which threatens to do harm or actually does harm to human well-being, life and property; or to the natural environment. All disasters are emergencies, but not all emergencies are disasters. 

Another definition, once offered by FEMA to a business gathering, is that an emergency is: "any unplanned [we may add, or planned] event that can cause deaths or significant injuries to employees, customers or the public; or that can shut down your business, disrupt operations, cause physical or environmental damage, or threaten the facility's financial or public image."

FEMA's examples of emergency events -- which have served as an initial point of reference for many individuals and organizations just getting into the more conceptual aspects of their work -- include: fire, hazardous material incident, flood or flash flood, hurricane, tornado, winter storm, earthquake, communications failure, radiological incident, civil disturbance, loss of key supplier or customer and explosion.

UNHCR (2000: 4), true to its global mandate, defines Refugee Emergency as "any situation in which the life or well-being of refugees will be threatened unless immediate and appropriate action is taken, and which demands an extraordinary response and exceptional measures."

Back To The Future: Today's Mass Migration To Europe Evokes Thotes and Images

Today's mass migration into Europe, I've recently been thinking, is a replay, of sorts, of African occupation of Europe c.30 to 50,000 years ago, when the Cro-Magnon were their only resistance. A Europe before Europa, even.

The Africans were not fleeing. They were going forth and multiplying -- populating a world, and then the world, without any profound level of Aristotelian thought -- Aristotle, who was their distant nephew -- about the consequences, for them and for the very same world (see Out of Africa: A Comment on..Roberts). At the same time, it's a wholly different thing.

READ: "Syrian Refugees Challenge Us to Be Better"

SEE! German Protesters Throw Stones at Refugee Buses at Heidenau:

READ: Today's refugees follow the path Hungarians who fled Soviets in 1956

There were no TV networks to record the Africans' movement, and the various arrivals. No social media. Perhaps talking drums. Perhaps smoke-talking. Perhaps an extinct precursor of vuvuzela under the armpit. No trains or rail-tracks. Only Cro-Magnons and wildlife. Only animal tracks to doggedly follow, then. An arsenal of stone things, perhaps. Wooden things. Stringed stuff. No gunnery.

LOOK! Refugees'face harsh conditions

No one to offer them shelter. Or winter clothing. Shelter offered itself, in the caves and hillsides and unreachable rocks. Or food. Or bottled water. Ah s'pose they had the wherewithal to grab and occupy unblemished bearskin from reluctant bears, who'd never seen apparitions such as that. Wolfskin from stunned wolves. Woolen gear from all those clueless rams in open spaces. Something of the woolly mammoth from altogether new neighborhoods -- and farther East, in the permafrost.

READ: Germany Struggling to house asylum seekers

The smarts to be their own transport. Or create transportation and communication systems out of nothing. To build rafts and boats for slow rowing, paddling up the Rhine. Hither and thither, blakka than blu, on the Danube. Down, up Senghor's Seine. And else.

To feed off a land without ice cream. Beat all resistance.

They changed Europe beyond anyone's reverse-prediction, and changed a world which in turn changed them too. They're today's Europeans agonizing over the new migrants.

Perhaps there is something in Germany's Angela Merkel, now crowned Mama, that 'remembers' all of this and urges her to do what she's doing.

And if nothing of what I've said evokes enough going, perhaps Chidinma's video images in Kite will, thanks to Clarence Peters, connect enough visual dots and cross enough Ts of the mind to evoke the kind of epic future we keep going back to in our acts and our thotes. and which I was trying to say something about here.

[Update: September 11, 2015:The video portion of Kite does evoke the past I think it does. Yet in making that remark I overlooked the fact there is, at least for me, another stand-out imagery to the same effect that I have previously publicly noted. A more powerful evocation, if I may say so now. Here, look at what I tweeted in April this year about the video stream in Davido's hit song One of a Kind:

"@MauriYambo Apr 5 @YouTube The visuals in #Davido's #OneOfAKind video evoke (unintentionally? subliminally?) images of #humanity's epic migration #OutOfAfrica"

You will have to decide for yourself if we are to 'read' the visual text in One of a Kind the way I have read it. Forget the lyrics for a moment, or perhaps you shouldn't. Just contemplate this recreation, this pure levitation, of the generic inner gaze confronted -- as it must surely have, so long ago -- with the possibility of a future beyond mortal imagination, but one (of a kind) in which we now live and in which current events have begun to present as such a monumental throwback]:

P.S.: VIDEO UPDATE 1 (Sept 10, 2015): "We walk together"

P.S: VIDEO UPDATE 2 (Sept 14, 2015: Something New, Something Old: CNN's chronicle of the new migration