Today’s New York Times ran a story on the destructive effects on children of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. You can find it at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05trailer.html?pagewanted=all
There were not too many responses; I added my voice, and wrote the following:
December 05, 2008 11:21 am
Thank you for this article. It breaks my heart all over again. I started personlinks.org as a voluntary effort to (re)link families that had been blown apart by Katrina. Fortunately there were many web sites doing that work; unfortunately, could the most affected families gain access to computers and use them? Perhaps not.
Solutions to an individual’s problems don’t lie entirely with the government, or the school system, or the parents. At some point something has to be available that remedies a lack, that a child or teen or adult can grab onto and take hold of, and make her or his own.
Can we build intelligent programs that do just that, in New Orleans with its particular mix of problems, or on the Gulf Coast? Can we build prevention programs that move into disaster areas and prevent the worst aftermath of a disaster? The mantra is “Yes, we can.”
If, nationally, we are in our own massive recovery effort, how do we help that part of ourselves as a nation that are most disabled, by disaster, poverty, ignorance and illiteracy, and physical and emotional disability? We have done so before, in the midst of war, when we launched the War on Poverty. The community action centers established in that legislation provided NOT church people to go out and sell religion, NOT added school services, NOT added government welfare services. Instead, people who lived in the communities affected, and knew them well, and were themselves affected by the same forces — and who had, or could be trained in, leadership skills — took a major role in identifying community problems, assisting individuals to take advantage of programs, transporting people who had no cars, arranging for local distribution of government surplus food, translating a guide to available services into Spanish, and more yet that could be described or imagined. What this did, and I’ve seen it, was to enable those intelligent choices that are so lamented. What this did was to enable pride, when a community could march for and obtain the first township level open-housing ordinance.
Oh, yes, and there was Head Start. Because of Head Start, children who were showing signs of kwashiorkor could get proper nutrition — we do still have the federal WIC - Women and Infant Children Program that provides for essential nutrition for pregnant women and their children.
I now live between the memory of that world, where the United States ended many discriminatory practices in the law books, launched the War on Poverty, and put a man on the moon — while drafting young men to fight in Viet Nam.
New Orleans is a symbol for what we cannot do. It is not enough to point a finger at President Bush and his poor choices. Where were we, when we knew better? Where were we, when idealistic young people had practical-minded parents who wanted them to major in economics and business subjects, and graduate to a Wall Street Job?
I want to close with sloganeering, because these slogans are meaningful to my theme, and because they stay in the mind, and may help to keep aspects of the problem front and center:
1) Walt Kelly put in the mouth of Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
2) “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.”
They date me, and also indicate, without explaining, why I am not now on the frontlines in New Orleans or the Gulf.
— Compassion101, Philadelphia
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