The Unnatural Tragedy of New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina was an unavoidable natural disaster. How we are dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is an avoidable unnatural disaster. Most of the devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast emerged from what raw nature has done. Wider and more long lasting damage to our nation can only result from what human nature is doing.
The typically human tendency to find and fix blame is as dangerous as it is destined to fail. The “blame game,” which we all seem to decry even as we participate in it, has no winners. It does have losers, plenty of them. They will not be from just one political party, race, religion or administrative level or arm of government.
As we engage in the cathartic if unproductive search for who to blame, perhaps we can find some guidance in our Constitution. It begins, as all schoolchildren know, with “We, the people…” This is not just semantics. The Constitution proclaimed the fundamental principle, unique in history at the time, that this would be a nation where all power – and ultimately all responsibility – comes from and must be exercised by the people. So if we want to blame anyone for what has happened in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, perhaps we should blame ourselves. After all, Thomas Jefferson reminded us, our leaders serve only with the “consent of the governed.”
And we have given our consent, by our silence as well as by our votes.
We have consented to the tendency to accept short-term solutions where long-term ones were needed. How else do we explain our willingness to tolerate the weakening of New Orleans natural storm barriers as well as the failure to strengthen its man-made ones? Our leaders at all levels ignored long-term infrastructure needs because we let them.
We have consented to consumption rather than investment, a decades-long rush for material comfort that has, in the end, lowered our ability to preserve that very standard of living we so avidly purchased. No one made us save less, spend more, and so end up with a national and personal debt that makes finding the money to prevent and recover from disasters so hard.
We have consented to approach our world with hubris rather than humility, assuming that the unthinkable was also impossible and that planning and organizational structures could hold back the forces of nature. We can’t blame our leaders for turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the same warnings that caused us to do the same, because what happened in New Orleans was forecast, more than once.
It may be comforting now, in the wake of the storm, to think that it was all the fault of the federal government, or the state government, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, or those who run FEMA or those who serve in State capitols. Comforting but wrong. Because in our democracy, those who lead us are chosen by us and answerable to us. If they did wrong, so did we.
In the despair of the winter of 1776, when the American Revolution looked so hopelessly lost, Thomas Paine, an immigrant writer who had failed at everything he tried in the Old World reminded those of us just starting in the New World that “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Perhaps it’s time to look into our souls as Americans and accept that until we change, those who lead us will not change. Perhaps it is time to demand long-term solutions not short-term fixes, save more than we spend so as to put our fiscal house in the order needed to invest in the infrastructure of America, and recognize that we would do far better living within nature’s laws than trying to ignore them.
The typically human tendency to find and fix blame is as dangerous as it is destined to fail. The “blame game,” which we all seem to decry even as we participate in it, has no winners. It does have losers, plenty of them. They will not be from just one political party, race, religion or administrative level or arm of government.
As we engage in the cathartic if unproductive search for who to blame, perhaps we can find some guidance in our Constitution. It begins, as all schoolchildren know, with “We, the people…” This is not just semantics. The Constitution proclaimed the fundamental principle, unique in history at the time, that this would be a nation where all power – and ultimately all responsibility – comes from and must be exercised by the people. So if we want to blame anyone for what has happened in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, perhaps we should blame ourselves. After all, Thomas Jefferson reminded us, our leaders serve only with the “consent of the governed.”
And we have given our consent, by our silence as well as by our votes.
We have consented to the tendency to accept short-term solutions where long-term ones were needed. How else do we explain our willingness to tolerate the weakening of New Orleans natural storm barriers as well as the failure to strengthen its man-made ones? Our leaders at all levels ignored long-term infrastructure needs because we let them.
We have consented to consumption rather than investment, a decades-long rush for material comfort that has, in the end, lowered our ability to preserve that very standard of living we so avidly purchased. No one made us save less, spend more, and so end up with a national and personal debt that makes finding the money to prevent and recover from disasters so hard.
We have consented to approach our world with hubris rather than humility, assuming that the unthinkable was also impossible and that planning and organizational structures could hold back the forces of nature. We can’t blame our leaders for turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the same warnings that caused us to do the same, because what happened in New Orleans was forecast, more than once.
It may be comforting now, in the wake of the storm, to think that it was all the fault of the federal government, or the state government, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, or those who run FEMA or those who serve in State capitols. Comforting but wrong. Because in our democracy, those who lead us are chosen by us and answerable to us. If they did wrong, so did we.
In the despair of the winter of 1776, when the American Revolution looked so hopelessly lost, Thomas Paine, an immigrant writer who had failed at everything he tried in the Old World reminded those of us just starting in the New World that “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Perhaps it’s time to look into our souls as Americans and accept that until we change, those who lead us will not change. Perhaps it is time to demand long-term solutions not short-term fixes, save more than we spend so as to put our fiscal house in the order needed to invest in the infrastructure of America, and recognize that we would do far better living within nature’s laws than trying to ignore them.
posted by Responsible Leader @ 8:31 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home