Posted on 09/02/2005 12:57:29 PM PDT by sionnsar
This time it’s going to take more than writing a check.
We have lost a city. We have lost a major city. There are a million homeless, desperate people overwhelming northern Louisiana and Mississippi, and pressing into Arkansas, Texas and elsewhere. Their homes are gone, their jobs are gone, and they won’t be going back for months, if ever. I believe that they will never go home. FEMA can rebuild the homes, but they can’t never rebuild the businesses. Those businesses will rebuild elsewhere. They will move to higher ground, and they will remember the looting. The parts of Washington DC that were looted after riots following the death of Martin Luther King Jr., have not yet been rebuilt. That was more than thirty years ago. Those businesses left, despite the fact that most buildings were intact, and the devastation affected only a handful of streets, rather than an entire city.
New Orleans is lost. It will be weeks before the floodwaters recede and the dead can even be buried. It will be months before the ground is safe for human habitation. We are going to need to deal very differently with the masses of humanity that are crowding into the Houston Astrodome. We are going to need to deal very differently with the folks in the homeless shelters filling up throughout Louisiana and Southern Arkansas. They won’t be going back any time soon. We can deal with them in one of two ways.
Right now, it looks like we are dealing with the Katerina refugees the way we deal with most refugees. We set up Red Cross Shelters, we send in truckloads of food and medical supplies, eventually we hope to have a little tent city assuring basic survival to the refugees. That’s right and proper, and the most efficient way to handle an acute emergency. That’s what we’ve always done in wars, hurricanes and natural disasters. It works well when folks will be going home in a few weeks. Or even in a month or two. Or maybe in six months max. After that, a million-man refugee ghetto (however sanitary it may have been in the beginning) becomes the lawless, health hazard that New Orleans appears to be becoming now.
Tent cities don’t work when folks will never go home. If the Katrina refugees never go home, than all we will do is create a gigantic Gaza strip filled with desperate people with no hope, jobs or prospects. During the 1967 “Six-Day War”, Palestinians from what is now Israeli territory evacuated, expecting to eventually go home when Egypt and the other Arab nations won. The Arab nations lost, and then refused to resettle the refugees in their territories, fearing the impact of hundreds of thousands of penniless beggars. Israel refused to have them back. A generation has grown up in poverty and anger, and the fruits of their despair are readily viewed in the news reports from the Middle East. The Gaza strip is a ghetto with a million angry criminals in it, inciting their children to hatred. But those Gaza refugees didn’t begin as “suicide bombers”. They began as ordinary people who lost everything, and were forced to remain in limbo without the means to relocate. We in the US are at risk for creating just such a Gaza strip in our own land. For our sake, and theirs, and for the sake of our country we must not do so. The consequences of such a second “Katrina” are too dreadful to contemplate.
There are other alternatives to resettling enormous numbers of homeless beggars. During World War II, German bombing raids on London created massive numbers of homeless people who lost everything they owned and needed to be relocated elsewhere. But the British didn’t just build refugee camps and homeless shelters. To their credit thousands of British refugees, mostly mothers and children, were relocated to families in the countryside. It became a point of honor for English families to take in the homeless, and those who were initially reluctant to do so, (pointing out that the manners and morals of Cockney children differed from their own “values”) usually changed their minds. Nobody enjoyed this exercise in national charity. Those taking in refugees lost their privacy, those cast on the charity of strangers lost some dignity. Everyone lost money. But the communal fellowship of England was vastly better than the sterile “charity” of the camps in Gaza. Dispossessed Cockney children grew up as sons, daughters and Englishmen, not as aliens in their own land. England rebuilt more strongly than ever.
Let’s do the same. We have to. No government can build a refugee center to replace New Orleans, but people throughout the US can rebuild families, one at a time. Most of us, who own a computer, have a couch that a single refugee could sleep on. Others of us may be fortunate enough to have enough room to house a family. Here is a computer list that will hopefully match the homeless to one of us.
So let’s all of us write that check but, more than that, let’s open our homes to a family that has lost everything they have. Let’s show them that even if you’ve lost everything, hope is never lost when you’re an American. Because we are Americans. Let’s not be Middle Eastern in our “charity”. Let’s be “Anglican” (whatever our religion). And let’s show the world what one “nation, under God” can look like.
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. ping
The Palestinians, even during the terrible winter of 1949, when there was a high number of deaths in the camps, did not spend their time looting or shooting at one another. There is a strong family basis in their society. It is patriarchal and stable, they have values - especially when they were the generation of the villages and the fields. Being an UNWRA worker to the camps was quite a safe job.
Our church is discussing how to facilitate this tonite. This will work for middle-class New Orleanians and for Christian New Orleanians, regardless of class. Americans all over and especially Christian Americans are trying to figure out how to make their extra bedroom house a family from NO as I write. Most New Orleanians who are middle class or Christian will be back on their feet (probably in a city other than NO) within a year with the help of hundreds-of-thousands of American families.
But the big problem is the NO underclass. If they get moved to refugee camps, the camps will turn into violent, drug-filled ghettos quickly and the race pimps will make every attempt to enforce order there into a huge racial issue.
But if they don't go to refugee camps, where to they go? It's going to be hard to find placement for them in people's homes, even Christian homes, because noone wants to subject their own family to danger and because non-Christian underclass members are perceived as a risky proposition in that regard.
So if we set up refugee camps, they are likely to become permanent. I believe it is therefore important to disperse the NO underclass from the very start rather than put it all in one or two big spots. A concentrated underclass is what we have now in NO and they are shooting at rescue boats and helicoptors. That's not going to change when they get pissed off about refugee camp conditions. The problem is, how do you disperse the underclass when noone wants them in their homes?
This is the biggest single problem that will come out of Katrina and it is a wound that will fester for years. In effect, the NO underclass has been in a refugee camp for years. It's just that it has been hidden from the cameras in bad parts of NO. It looks to me like tent cities filled with the NO underclass are inevitable. So the refugee camps will be front-and-center and the tv cameras and the race-pimps will be drawn irresistably to it, like flies to a corpse. Many will suffer. The camps will be a source of racial hatred and violence for years to come.
There is, maybe, a solution though I don't like it. For a while now Seattle (really, King County) has been experimenting with (social engineering with) relatively small tent cities for the homeless. They are not concentration camps, though there are some restrictions, and right now they're moving every few months -- often a church offers some land -- but they're highly controversial: almost nobody wants one near them.
Yet, if one created hundreds or thousands of such in cities across the country, mixing these with local homeless, you at least dilute the NO group.
Maybe dispersal into small tent cities would work. I don't know. I know that the Church needs to get cracking fast and get missionaries into those tent cities. It may be a huge evangelical opportunity. There are many lost souls in the NO underclass that need-a-savin'. Maybe the change will open a lot of hearts to the truth. But they need to hear it.
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