Hurricane Katrina offers an opportunity to reflect on the status quo, which, as one wag put it, is Latin for “the mess we’s in.”
I’ve seen Mayor What’s-His-Name from New Orleans calling for someone to come in and rebuild his city. The governors of the gulf states have been a little better, but only a little; and President Bush has done an adequate job that still falls short of inspiring.
The news networks have made much of the rich-vs.-poor divide and racial tensions in the afflicted states, and have been careful to make sure I’m apprised of the latest news concerning the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba.
It seems like everywhere I turn for news I see Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Parenthetically, I wonder how many black Americans resent being represented by those clowns the same way I resent being lumped in under Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell?)
Chief Justice William Rehnquist has died. Get ready for some ugliness on Capitol Hill - even by the Hill’s notorious standards.
David Brooks compares the status quo to the 1970’s, when pessimism and gloom overtook the country.
…It is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970’s, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.
“Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown/What a mess! This town’s in tatters/I’ve been shattered,” Mick Jagger sang in 1978.
Midge Decter woke up the morning after the night of looting during the New York blackout of 1977 feeling as if she had “been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one’s house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away.”
It took the vision, leadership, and optimism of Ronald Reagan to get us out of that mess, and he inaugurated that leadership with these words:
We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding - we’re going to begin to act beginning today. The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
All of us together - in and out of government - must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable with no one group singled out to pay a higher price. We hear much of special interest groups. Well our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries, or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we’re sick - professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “We the People.” This breed called Americans.
I’m not going to lament (as so many do) that we just need to find another Reagan to stir us to greatness: did you hear what the man said? He said we are what’s necessary for greatness, not a president, governor, mayor, judge, orator, news network, talk show host, or minister. Are you simply stirred by his words? Or are you stirred to action?
And yet… we need a leader. Nature abhors a vacuum, and we have a leadership vacuum right now. Who will fill it? Will it be Rev. Al? Brother Jesse? Senator Clinton? There are lots of wounded people out there - needy, like sheep without a shepherd, as someone once said - but multitudes of wounded are sure to attract more predators than saviors.
Dan taught yesterday that tragedy reveals where we’ve put our trust, or to use the “spiritual” word, faith. Clearly, we can’t trust our leadership any more than we can trust the weather. Trusting yourself is too often a recipe for disaster, but a measure of self-reliance is surely a good thing. Just take a guess whom we ought to be trusting: then ask yourself whether your life is aligned with that obvious answer, and if not, why?
I only pray that God will have mercy on us all in the years to come: people are hungry for someone, anyone, to lead them. May God spare us from the likes of a King Saul or a Hitler who comes to power on account of a short-sighted rush to fill the leadership vacuum and give us what we want instead of what we need.
