Overlooked Tragedies

When I write these days, it is often as an old man. I have seen a lot of life, up close and personal. I still know a lot of people who run toward danger when most folks are running away.

This year, there is an awful lot of talk about things government should and should not be doing for people. When you are sitting around in a suit and tie or walking into some climate controlled assembly hall, it is easy to talk about people doing things for themselves.

When you've been places where even the strongest and the best are challenged to do for themselves, you learn things about people.

That was the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. People literally saw everything they owned washed away. Cars, houses, clothing, everything.

The aftermath of that tragedy puts the lie to liberterian ideals. One cannot expect government to do the minimum in times when many people are exhausted and have only God and their last strength to fall back on.

When you see despair in people's faces, and total surrender in the faces of the old and sick, civilized people look to authority for providence and benevolence. If government is to have any authority at all, it must be ready and able to step in with material aid when God may want men and women to depend upon each other.

In 2005, government was more than a wee bit late. The private sector cut its losses and looked to insurance companies to make them whole, and tens of thousands of people looked to government for help.

Believe me, it was chaos, not just in Lousiana, but across the country. Lots of people who had nothing spent their last change to make calls for help. After fumbling the call, the government dispatched a lot of debit cards, wrote a lot of checks and made a lot of direct deposits.

In the chaos, lots of money changed hands and some of it needed to be sorted out later.

Well, after seven years, it has been sorted out, Some people-- no, tens of thousands of people owe thousands of dollars. They are not crooks. They were people up against it. In a time of chaos they took the aid they were offered and took as much of the aid as they could possibly get.

Today, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that those who owe less than about $4,300
will have their debts waived. Yes it is taxpayer's money, but it is money that even after seven years, many of the victims, have not seen since.


In many ways, what happened with natural disasters in 2005, set the stage for the economic disaster that began two years later. The government was again, asleep at the switch, At a time when people needed and looked toward authority for help and guidance, some good people were silent.

Now, we need them all to care and understand.

Consider the Foundations of Your Beliefs

I believe most people are predisposed to be good, social and caring. I don't think it is a naive point of view, because I understand that if people are led to believe that certain outlooks are acceptable, they will adopt that point of view.

When you teach a child, you repeat what you want them to learn again and again, and over time, they repeat it to you. Then you reinforce the image or action with words that best represent the concept and the meaning is imprinted.

This is what has been going on since Nov. 4, 2008. "If we never refer to 'him' as President Obama, he will never really be president."

There are people in this country who have dealt with the last election as though it were a bad dream. They want to believe that since Jan. 20, 2009, there has been no one in the White House and no one running the United States.

This is the fiction that has made it so easy for people named Wilson, Sensenbrenner and Brewer to get headlines over the past few years. Their actions have left lasting impressions, constantly reinforced by angry pundits, writers and in conversations held beyond the earshot or those warranting language that was "politically correct."

One thing Ihave learned in more than 40 years of being in the news business: Headlines make Page One and last forever.  Apologies are buried somewhere beyond page three and never receive the same attention.

I also know that for decades, no one confronting  a sitting president at any event ever got within fingerpointing distance of the leader of the Free World. These types of sad activities will forever change the nature of the U.S. Presidency.

By talking about the physique of the First Lady or suggesting for a moment that Brewer “felt a little bit threatened, if you will, in the attitude that he had,” is to play up to the basest stereotypes of the past.

This is likely to be significant as we head into the election cycle of 2012. Already, Newt Gringrich has been admonished for rattling the sensibilities of our Cubano cousins. I have said in recent days that the basest natures of "Willie Horton racism" will play out in the months ahead.

What I can tell you is that many people have been desensitized to racism and classism since 2008. They have been conditioned to believe that finger pointing, blaming and labeling is natural, normal and acceptable. Perhaps reminding them of what they are willing to accept as truth, could jar them back to reality.

Anger, distrust and resentment have become so ingrained that they are considered, normal and natural.Even as their parents came around to the inequity of those concepts as they existed in the past, perhaps they need to be reminded of the unfairness of it all. Should we have to fight the battles of the last generation again, simply because we are silent?

Inside, if the people accepting all of this believe in Jesus, and the fundamental truth that God created all men equal, can they really believe that anything like this could ever be acts of Christian kindness?

Perhaps there is more than the souls of political parties hanging here in the balance.

The Great Recession: We Survived

The economic downturn that began in 2007 statistically ended in 2009. While the human suffering and the struggle to recover has continued, somewhere along the line, that two-year period became a defining era.

The Associated Press, arbiters of journalistic style, and the hardest working collective group of 4,500  journalists in the world now refers to the period as the Great Recession. That means it is on a par with other benchmark events of the past 160 years. Those include the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II.

When you look around the room take pride in the fact that despite your diminished circumstances, your derailed retirement plans and the assorted boomerang children you may still be harboring, the fact of the matter is that you survived.

Seventy-five years from now, when people start reviewing the personal data of the 2010 U.S. Census, the details of your survival will become more than statistics. It will be part of the historic record and available to anyone who cares to look.

One of my brothers is a retired journalist who has used his talents for genealogical research in recent years. He has been able to look back on census date from 1930 and learn a lot about how my own family weathered the Great Depression.

It turns out that my maternal grandfather once was a member of my maternal grandmother's father's household. While I only knew my grandfather as an old man and great provider, he was once a young man dependent upon his wife's family for his very survival.

It's funny what history and official documents will be able to tell future generations about you and the people in your life. Very few of us will look back upon the Great Recession as "the good old days," but it is likely some of our children will remember it as a time when people of all types rediscovered the meaning of family.

Climbing out of the misery, and slowly watching people we care about find jobs and hope for better futures, some of us can look back at the spiraling collapse of the first decade of the 21st century. As we turn our thoughts to God and all the strength he helped to pull from deep within our souls, we can give thanks, smile inwardly and breathe the fresh breezes of relief.

Confronted with the all too real hardships of the Great Recession, we survived.