When Hurricane Andrew ripped through Dade County, Florida, in
August, 1992 it took three days for county officials to ascertain
the extent of the damage but it took the Dade County Emergency
Manager only seconds to utter a phrase that more than any other
assured Bill Clinton of the Presidency: “Where in the hell is the
cavalry on this one?”
She was the Democrat Kate Hale taking out after FEMA, the
federal emergency management agency, whose response to the problems
of destruction was found to be slow. Hale’s question was seized
upon by the media at a moment when President Bush could ill afford
such accusations of unresponsiveness and it is being voiced again
in the wake of the New Orleans catastrophe.
The Hale rhetoric spurred immediate federal action. President
Bush pledged 100 percent of the Andrew cleanup costs instead of the
usual 75 percent. The feds decided to make this retroactive to the
damages inflicted by Hurricane Hugo in other parts of the South in
1989. The federal bill for Florida’s cleanup alone finally totaled
$8 billion — a large fraction of the estimates for Hurricane
Katrina. Where was the 8 billion to come from in 1992? Louisiana’s
Democratic Senator Bennett Johnston had a famous answer: “It will
be paid for out of the deficit.”
Money, of course, is not the measure of misery. Texas is now
overflowing with refugees from its neighbor state and gently asks,
“no more, please.” As one Janice Singleton, who worked at New
Orleans’ “Superdome” and was robbed of everything, including her
shoes, says, “They tore the dome apart. I don’t want to go to no
Astrodome. I’ve been domed almost to death.” The plight of the
refugees and the sight of their aimless wandering has a steady,
nearly audible sub-theme. It is not the cavalry of Washington that
can ride to the rescue. It is another outfit, fallen largely into
disrepair and even disrepute. It is the family. It doesn’t
heed calls from afar because it is near, very near.
Whether FEMA has been subsumed by Homeland Security or not,
there is one saving entity which every American should look to
anew. It is the family, which forms community, which is the bulwark
and the levee that will not break. The “single parent” as the media
euphemistically refers to the umarried mother trekking toward San
Antonio with a newborn in her arms has no such bulwark. Society has
insisted that there is a federal cavalry out there someplace, an
omnipotent, omniscient force that will arrive and save the day,
well, someday. And society has come to believe in that force as a
substitute for the unit that built the nation — the family.
As the toll and the recriminations grow in Louisiana it behooves
the nation to repair to the family, to revivify this unit. No
matter where Americans may live there lurks always the possibility
of calamity, natural or manmade. No family should be without the
means to communicate with certainty, to defend with force if need
be, to subsist on nutrients put by, to move to plateaus of safety.
To have a plan.
Sure, FEMA has a job. Police have a job. The National Guard has
a job. Active duty troops have a job. The Red Cross, Salvation
Army, and two dozen other charitable outfits have a job. May they
all perform their works well.
But the family. It is not a job to the family. It is an act of
love. And the greatest of these is — well, you know very well.
