24 September 2005
Reinventing the Wheel We Ride On
The costs of rebuilding communities, businesses and infrastructure devestated by Katrina and Rita hurricanes may never be known until some Ph.D. aspirant chooses this subject for the thesis. Initial academic modeling may estimate a grand total separate from the control model's extant federal, state, local government's and private industry's development before Katrina. But for now, people need the means just to go on, day to day, with some hope that their misery is temporary for them.
Grand policy platitudes about loss and recovery lack the poignant statement of a single mother, an unemployed family breadwinner, a teenage child whose home life had been violent, despoiled by alcohol or drugs, a retired person whose house or farm had been the income supplement when Social Security failed to provide enough.
Americans outside of the disaster region need a face, a person to identify with, to generate their personal caring, empathy and willingness to engage in the recovery of another person, someone "they know" whom they will take some responsibility for assisting. Personalizing a regional trauma like we now face is the only way to avoid ideology battles among the politicians.
Let the government provide a structure for individuals to build new lives, communities and commerce. Big Government--whether Republican or Democrat--decide these local choices or limit them through social engineering and by confining funding only to the government's program efforts. In areas of the world torn apart by war or natural disaster, any recovery effort has to include everyone who will be affected. Inclusion breeds personal ownership of communally designed solutions.
But this approach is counter to the hierarchical culture of corporations, government bureaucracies and class. Somehow knowing that these efforts have found success in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Balkins and in the Asian sub-continent and archipelago populations offers hope for our own crisis and trauma recovery.
America should learn from others who have done what we are about to do. Any bets?
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Grand policy platitudes about loss and recovery lack the poignant statement of a single mother, an unemployed family breadwinner, a teenage child whose home life had been violent, despoiled by alcohol or drugs, a retired person whose house or farm had been the income supplement when Social Security failed to provide enough.
Americans outside of the disaster region need a face, a person to identify with, to generate their personal caring, empathy and willingness to engage in the recovery of another person, someone "they know" whom they will take some responsibility for assisting. Personalizing a regional trauma like we now face is the only way to avoid ideology battles among the politicians.
Let the government provide a structure for individuals to build new lives, communities and commerce. Big Government--whether Republican or Democrat--decide these local choices or limit them through social engineering and by confining funding only to the government's program efforts. In areas of the world torn apart by war or natural disaster, any recovery effort has to include everyone who will be affected. Inclusion breeds personal ownership of communally designed solutions.
But this approach is counter to the hierarchical culture of corporations, government bureaucracies and class. Somehow knowing that these efforts have found success in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Balkins and in the Asian sub-continent and archipelago populations offers hope for our own crisis and trauma recovery.
America should learn from others who have done what we are about to do. Any bets?
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