I just put together my Amazon Wish List, so I thought while I was at it I would put together my wish list for the new Democratic Congress. It's pretty short:
1. Bring the troops back home.
2. Stop spending money paying Halliburton to fail to rebuild Iraq.
3. Start spending the money on rebuilding New Orleans.
I could add more, but really, if I got those 3 things, I'd consider myself a happy woman.
Last week the team of volunteers that our church sent down to New Orleans to help gut houses returned, and our rector gave a sermon about it this Sunday. Gut houses, I hear you say. The hurricane hit in August 2005. It's December 2006. That's...almost 16 months. They're
still gutting houses down there?
Yes, Virginia, they are still gutting houses, one at a time, using volunteer groups from churches. You know what else? 60% of the population still hasn't moved back. There are entire neighborhoods down there that look basically exactly the way they looked in September 2005. The only thing there's a lot more of now than there was in September is FEMA trailers. Lots and lots of FEMA trailers.
Have you ever wondered why we don't hear more about the massive national effort to rebuild New Orleans? Why we don't get little updates occasionally from the federal agencies whose job it is to ensure that New Orleans is restored and that the people who lost their homes will be able to move back and rebuild their lives? Why we're not being asked by our government to show our support the brave men and women who have been recruited by our government to go to New Orleans and help save it from disaster? Why there are no magnetic ribbons on the backs of all those SUVs you pass as you drive to work saying "Rebuild New Orleans"? Why there's no "Christmas In New Orleans" special running on all major networks this year to show us how much progress has been made there since the dark and desolate December 2005?
If not, that just shows you how badly Bush's 'leadership' has warped us all. We have even forgotten how to ask the right questions.
As some of you know, during the spring of 2006 I did a little Lenten project where I looked for 40 ways for people to get involved in helping the rebuilding effort. Here's a list of
the forty-nine that I wound up posting about. They range from professional philanthropic organizations with well-established fund-raising tactics and distribution systems to 'organizations' that basically consist of a handful of individuals pooling their resources to do what they can. Undoubtedly some of them are defunct now. They were all standing up, as it were, because our government stood down. The initial federal response to the disaster was so lame, inadequate, insulting, and criminal that it provoked thousands of ordinary citizens to try to do for their fellow-Americans what their government would or could not.
It would be a fabulous Libertarian bedtime story, if only it had a better ending.
Listening to our rector talk about what the volunteer group had done, my admiration for their willingness to go down there and put in the time and effort and sweat equity to make their tiny dent was mingled with a painful consciousness of how little they were really able to do. In a week, they gutted seven houses. That's seven families who might come back to rebuild--or might not. They might be too daunted by the vast swathes of ungutted, unrepaired, rotting houses that surround them. They might be too daunted by the school systems that are trying to operate with no money and a skeleton staff, by the city services still in disarray after the loss of the tax revenues that pay for them, by the devastation still visible everywhere you look, by the sheer emotional difficulty of going back to a neighborhood that was alive and listening to the silence while they wait for other people to come back.
There are some things government is good for and some things that are better left to other institutions or people. One of the things that makes the difference is scale. The government can work on a bigger scale than individuals can. Sometimes that's a problem; doing everything big can lead to a lot of waste and inefficiency. Under these circumstances, however, it is really the only solution. The market will not regenerate this city--at least not as anything other than a patchwork of artificial developments inhabited by tourists and their trappers. Individuals can attack it from all different directions and make their differences and it does matter; but to bring a city back from the dead requires an intervention as extraordinary as the event that is still threatening to kill it.
My partner and I were talking on Sunday about what could have been done. I said, a dozen people going down there and gutting a few houses is not going to do it. You'd need an army. No--you'd need the Civilian Conservation Corps. You'd need to send the government down there to hire people who've been thrown out of work and train them in construction and whatnot and put them to work rebuilding the city. That's what FDR would have done.
Of course, said my partner, nobody will ever do that now, because it's socialism.
And in fact, the only reason anything like that ever got done was because with so many hungry, angry, unemployed people with nothing to lose roaming the country in the wake of the Depression, the folks in charge figured they could choose between a government-organized and controlled experiment with socialism and a revolution which might create something a lot scarier. So FDR cooked up his alphabet soup, and people got paid, and a lot of national parks got built which now belong to everyone, and the revolution did not take place.
So that can't happen now. It will have to be something else. And I don't know what it will take, exactly. But if there isn't some sustained, intelligent, and well-funded federal attention devoted to rebuilding New Orleans and making it possible for people to go home again, there's a real risk that New Orleans is not going to make it. And then we will have a dead city within our own borders to match all the cities of the dead that we have created all over Iraq.
So that's what I want. Stop destroying cities over there so we can rebuild them over here. If it seems like too much to ask for, that only shows you how far we've all fallen.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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