CSotD: Too much, too late
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Dan Wasserman steps away from the "wow, what a storm!" pack for a more substantive comment on privatization and localization of FEMA-type relief.
Chris Christie's comments aside, I doubt there is enough time between now and the election for Sandy's impact to be felt at the polls. Plus, to put a cynically pragmatic spin on things, the hardest hit states weren't in play to begin with.
But we need FEMA. This is exactly what we need federal government for.
My perspective is based on having been through two major disasters, the 1998 Ice Storm and Hurricane Irene last year.
In '98, I was living in Plattsburgh and had no power for four days, which put me at about the midpoint: The city proper only lost power for about 20 minutes while others had their power off for more than a week.
We were swarmed with National Guard units and utility crews to cut up fallen trees and replace fallen poles, but the damage beyond that was somewhat incidental: Trees fallen on garages and suchlike.
Not to belittle that incidental damage: One fellow not only lost the use of his home for two or three weeks but had to clamber through tangles of downed trees with jerry cans of water each day to get to his barn and care for his horses.
But once power was restored, life resumed. It wasn't free, but it didn't take long.
Then I moved down here and the pictures from New York's Battery are not unlike what we had when Irene struck, though New York is urban streets and we have malls and roads. Water halfway up the walls of stores and washing crud through the doors is pretty universal.
We certainly didn't have anything like that fire in Queens or the loss of life, but the type of damage to private and public infrastructure was, as it is in New York and New Jersey, both widespread and fundamental, requiring not simply repairs as in the ice storm, but major rebuilding and replacement of roads, buildings and bridges.
Irene was in August 2011, and we had stores that could not re-open before May 2012. And some, twisted and rocked off their foundations, never will re-open.
We had fund-raisers, we pitched in, we expended public funding. But we also got federal assistance, and I promise you, if the restoration of our infrastructure had been the responsibility of little Vermont and New Hampshire alone, it simply would not have happened.
Sandy now has created a need for both quick-response and in-depth efforts, and, in both cases, it would be impractical and thus unconscionable to expect state and local governments to shoulder the burden, and those impacted by the storm should thank God the "socialists" are still in charge.
While I don't expect some GOP stalwart to announce that this, too, is the will of God and thus not to be tampered with, I'm more concerned with the overall abandonment of our social contract.
We never envisioned direct democracy, even at the start, when we were a much smaller country.
Hunter-gatherers can sit in a circle and seek consensus on when to go on the buffalo hunt, since, if they continue to disagree, the "hunt now" group can break off and head for a new campsite.
We lost that head-for-the-frontier option in 1890, and it seemed that about a half century later, we came to grips with the idea of cooperation rather than rugged individualism, that, for instance, leaving states to fund their own schools led to a massive gap between rich and poor states that was not simply "unfair" but fundamentally destructive of the nation's economic future.
However, in the past few decades, those who were never reconciled to the fencing of the cattle range — and who never quite grasped the difference between John Wayne movies and actual history — have begun undoing the FDR/JFK/LBJ social contract with a process that lowers federal spending in favor of burdening the states and individuals with impossible responsibilities.
And I wish we had time between now and Tuesday for people to ponder just how this arrogant, selfish shell game would unfold in the face of disaster.
I also wish I had a pony.
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