Tornado Damage
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Back in the old days people would call their able-bodied neighbors and mention who had sustained the most damage. Church leaders would dispatch crews to the battle zone according to what talent was needed where. When the work was done there was a big potluck dinner and everyone went home happy. Then the guvment stepped in to make sure everything was done right. As Ronald Reagan once said: "The most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I am here to help." I think the most terrifying help the guvment can offer comes from FEMA. I won't say anything about New Orleans. Those deals stunk so bad that some token heads tumbled. FEMA personnel bringing in refugees in one western Arkansas town would flat run pedestrians over, then protested they weren't made to feel welcome. Clinton had a tornado a few months back; if FEMA ever acted it did so behind my back. 35 days after the tornado in Damascus FEMA still hasn't made a move. Things wouldn't be so bad except without FEMA sanctions any action taken will cost the community. On top of that FEMA concentrates what efforts it does make to those spots where bigger money deals can be struck.
Rural areas don't just get left in the lurch, they get a cussing for rocking the boat. Saturday I was with a work crew helping one rural (I guess you'd call it a community) area. Four families -- with young children -- had been without power or water for 35 days.
When our crew showed up and said we were there to help, nobody believed us. We worked for about thirty minutes then this little girl, maybe 5 years old, came out and began working with us. Gradually four grown men and two women pitched in. "There is just so much, so wrong." |
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| It wasn't just that we were there to help With a large crew, dedicated to getting the job done, disaster scenes can be cleaned up in a hurry. When we promised to bring in a portable generator and get the water running, several of them cried. No problem, we said. Can we put on a new roof too while we are out here?
There are so many people that want to help. And I'm not talking just the little guy. I'm talking AT&T and Wal*Mart and assorted other entities that step in with everything from bottled water to sledge hammers of the finest quality.
Tornadoes don't seem to understand the laws of economics.. The owner at this residence had just cleaned out all the trees doing poorly, "and now I've lost every one of them."
Back in Pre-FEMA days our churches would be the first places that community volunteers would go to work on, with one denomination helping another wherever it could. Now churches are left for last on the list as if they were sapping more strength out of a community than a kickbacking brothel.
Leaving a mess like this on an American countryside is a sour-faced shame and political absurdity when there are volunteers aching to put it right.
The same bunch of politicians that made ketchup a vegetable so our school children would have a balanced diet has now decided that nothing shall move in a disaster area until its handpicked stooges have muddied the waters so disastrously that no paper trail can be traced. Why should all our basic human desires to help be throttled by government agencies? Send these Jayhawkers back to
Washington It really is time to let America be great again. |
