|
Our
governor takes them seriously, but what about the
rest of us? Are we apt to throw a hurricane party
and treat the whole thing as a joke? Do we give
our political leadership a pass while we agonize
over issues like flag burning and feeding tubes?
We shouldn’t, and there are at least three
reasons why.
First,
shit happens. Mother Nature is unpredictable and
marches to her own drum. While we are better at
tracking weather than we used to be, we still can
be thrown a major-league curve ball in either the
form of a last-minute change or an unanticipated
secondary effect. On earthquakes we remain largely
clueless.
Second,
sea ports—we have a significant one of here in
Virginia--still play a major role in both national
and regional economies. Bulk shipments of forest
products, coal, agricultural products, and many
other valuable commodities, still move to their
destination least expensively via water. Any event
which impedes the smooth operation of our port
city and surrounding areas is going to cost
Virginians lost jobs, lost income, and higher
costs. At last report, even since Martha got out
of jail, none of these was considered a good
thing.
Third,
even though the mainstream media (MSM) has peed
down its collective legs playing the blame game
with who is responsible for saving whom and on
what schedule, the final responsibility for saving
your butt lies with YOU.
Who
could not be saddened to see that decades of
well-intentioned welfare policies in inner cities
have created populations so inarticulate and
underrepresented that they can’t ensure that
they are on the local officials’ evacuation
lists, and so confused and frustrated that they
shoot at the very people trying to help them.
Nonetheless, the political reality is that
government is expected to take care of the great
unwashed, which cannot care for itself.
The
fact is, people should not count on government to
save them. If individuals can band together to
build floats for their Mardi Gras Crewe or to buy
the booze for a hurricane party, they can band
together to find a way out of Dodge when the doo
doo hits the fast-whirling blade.
Those
who have been paying attention will recognize that
having poor people rely on government to save
their bacon in a real crisis runs counter to the
realities of American culture. Those without
political or economic power don’t have much pull
and don’t get much real attention when the winds
begin to blow. (Where, we wonder, were all
of the self-appointed spokesmen for and protectors
of Black America when the plans were being
written? No headlines there, we suppose.) Members
of the welfare class know in their heart of hearts
they’ve been had, but just don't understand
how or why. They are extremely resentful. Stories
of just this resentment has inspired incredibly
poor behavior are beginning to surface as
volunteers and others hit the web with their
experiences.
Sad
to say, any adequate rescue and recovery operation
that involves a large urban population requires a
large component of crowd control and logistics
management as well as traditional aid and succor.
Equally sad, large urban populations are the only
victims that lots of people seem to care about. If
you were a terrorist, would you use a nuclear
weapon to blow up more cows than people? Even if
you were counting on a large secondary explosion
from the high levels of methane gas likely to be
present in the pasture, it wouldn’t make sense.
When tornados rip through trailer parks in East
Windswept, it makes the evening news for one day
and we all move on as the Red Cross and local
officials move in. Further, large cities tend to
be located where there is significant economic
activity underway, so there will be a ripple
effect from a disaster.
The
net effect is that, as in New Orleans, until the
cavalry arrives in the form of the Coast Guard and
the National Guard to impose order upon and supply
the victims, local resources will flounder and
founder in meeting the challenge. As good and
heroic a job as the NYC fire, police, and EMS
departments did on 9/11/01, let’s remember that
the World Trade Center represents only a small
portion of the southern tip of Manhattan. If
a thirty-foot high tidal wave accompanied by 100+
m.p.h. winds had come boiling up New York Bay and
the Hudson and East Rivers, it would have been a
very different story in New York and New Jersey in
those bleak days.
Having
been in and around the military much of our lives,
we are not all that shot in the rear with the idea
of formally turning this kind of job over to the
military, but the fact of the matter is the armed
forces are the only ones up to it. The framers of
the U.S. Constitution worked hard to keep the
military out of civil affairs for good reason, but
when our people are dying in the streets it is not
the time for debates over political philosophy.
And we would be ill-advised to try to come up with
a civilian version of military capabilities.
Precisely
what makes the military good for this kind of work
is training, organization, discipline and
experience. They get things done but don’t
always get high marks from the faint hearted in
the process.
So,
how to go forward? Virginia seems to be in a
particularly good position to address the problem.
Gov. Mark R. Warner, immediate past chair of the
National Governors’ Association, and his
newfound disaster relief partner, Senator John
Warner, chair of the Senate Armed Service
Committee, could help ensure that sufficient
National Guard resources are committed to state
disaster relief and recovery operations. No
American should ever die while a governor says
that we couldn’t send in the troops because the
troops were all busy saving people overseas.
(That
doesn’t argue, incidentally, that we shouldn’t
use our military to defend freedom and our
interests abroad, but it may say something about
relying on all volunteer resources. It may also
say something about how the Pentagon goes through
its Quadrennial Reviews when it attempts to size
the forces to meet the strategy. While we have
thousands of “defense intellectuals” dancing
on their pinheads-–or was that dancing on the
head of a pin?—regarding planning for two
foreign wars or two and a half, we need to get
someone thinking about planning for and sizing for
domestic missions.)
The
Governor recently announced that some of the
federal Homeland Security money the state receives
is going to upgrade internal communications
capabilities within the state. That’s a start
but anyone who has ever been in a genuine fur ball
knows that interoperability is the real key: one
needs to have the ability to talk to exactly the
right person at exactly the right moment in order
to ensure that exactly the right direction gets to
exactly the right people.
Are
we planning to ensure that the civilian police can
talk to the military police?
Will
the Red Cross be able to talk to the Guard Command
Center?
Will
the Guard commanders be able to talk to the
elected officials?
These
are questions that the NGA and Congressional
delegations should be taking very
seriously.
Perhaps
equally as important, in view of the unrest and
anxiety created among the populace in New Orleans
by their inability to communicate with families
and loved ones, what are we going to do to address
civil communications issues? Can we put the
equivalent of cell towers and Internet POPs on
airplanes that orbit the disaster area? Can we
solve the problem of jammed radio frequencies in
such a situation? How do we keep battery operated
devices alive when the power grid goes down?
We
probably won’t know unless some significant
Federal R&D money is allocated to address
these and other related issues. We can’t
rationally expect the commercial sector to address
these issues on their own nickel because there is
no known market on which they could recover the
investment. Besides, if you had just lost your
hat, spats, and mess kit in a disaster, would you
want to get a $5,000 cell phone bill from your
friendly telco?
Harkening
back to our earlier Pogo-like epiphany that we
have met the best initial disaster relief provider
and it is us, what are the elected officials going
to do to address that reality?
We
are, unfortunately, both old enough to remember
the massive civil defense campaigns of the Cold
War, wherein we went to bed each night wondering
if the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union would
choose that night to vaporize us. Let’s check
the score in this “Preparing for Unfortunate
Events” ball game: Terrorists 1, Mother Nature a
whole bunch and counting, Soviets zip. If we were
betting folk, we’d put down a dime on being
prepared for something that either the crazies or
a natural disaster might do to us at least as well
as we were during the Cold War for something that
those huge defense budgets kept at bay.
It
would help, of course, if some right-minded
politico could use the power and platform of
his/her office to inform us on what to do and how
to best do it to protect ourselves and our
families.
There’s
a lot to do and we don’t know how much time we
have to get it done. We hope that Virginians,
being both blessed and vulnerable, will take the
lead in addressing these issues and getting “the
system” to take this stuff seriously. As much as
anything, we don’t want the very visible
suffering of our fellow citizens to have gone for
naught and have to learn the Lessons of Katrina
all over again.
--
September 29, 2005
|
