New Orleans just part of America's mess
By Andrew Greeley*
dailysouthtown.com
Friday, September 9, 2005
The terrible, tragic mess in New Orleans reflects and adds to the economic and social mess in the whole country. The foolish, endless war in Iraq has pushed the national debt beyond all reasonable limit. The tax benefits for Mr. Bush's friends, "the haves and the have-mores" as he called them in an unwise slip of the tongue, have aggravated the deficit problems for which the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren will have to pay.
Much of the debt is owned by the Chinese, who also have taken over the clothing market. Median family income and real wages fell again this year (according to the Wall Street Journal), and the proportion of the country who live in poverty has risen again. The cost of gasoline climbs almost every day because the obscenely profitable oil companies have not plowed any money into building new refineries for the past 15 years. The proportion of people without any health insurance has also increased.
Many industries — airlines and automotive especially — are trying to make money by outsourcing jobs to other countries and curtailing the salaries and benefits of their workers. The most notable of the offending industries — Big Oil and Big Pharma — are piling up profits squeezed from the lifeblood of the working and middle class.
No one cares about poverty anymore, so long as it is limited to the poor (like the people who couldn't escape from New Orleans because they couldn't afford an auto).
Now the country faces the task of rebuilding a major city and its port and its oil refineries and the rest of its crucial industries and its flood control system and providing new homes for the homeless of the city — which is practically everyone. One has to ask where the money will come from. The administration will characteristically talk big but do the job on the cheap, just as it has done the Iraq war with its inadequate body armor, unprotected vehicles, amphibious landing craft used as tanks, and not enough troops. New Orleans has become our second contemporary big muddy, and it will be mishandled as badly as the first.
Karl Rove will doubtless spin it all into a big victory for the president.
The strains and the tensions that the New Orleans crisis will cause in the American economy is a punishment for the pride and greed of this country. The punishment is not imposed by the Almighty (who has better things to do than spin out a vast storm to wipe out sin in the Big Easy), but it will be the result of the present cult of greed and pride. Ronald Reagan re-introduced this cult into our society, and George W. Bush has refined it to its logical conclusion. Greed is good. Pride in America is good, and anything goes.
Similarly, the Big Easy, one of the most interesting of American cities, if not high on the salubrious list, was punished for the greed and pride that permitted it (and the Congress of the United States) to gamble that its outmoded and inferior system of dikes — far below the standards of the embankments the Army Corps of Engineers has built along the rest of the Mississippi River — would protect it. Like the rest of the country, New Orleans was not worried about the decline of infrastructure. But its unique infrastructure was a matter of life and death. Only one levee gave in (at this writing), which would be a great blessing if one break did not permit Lake Pontchartrain to take over New Orleans.
The country's habit of responding to infrastructure problems with too little too late will produce more disasters. Airports that are too crowded, inadequate air-traffic control, poor public education, unconcern for the poor, spiraling medical costs — all are infrastructure problems that will come back to haunt us.
We are as a culture too proud and too greedy to worry about such matters, just as we didn't care a few years ago about the incompetence of the FBI and the CIA — and the inability of the FBI to hire enough translators of Arabic or devise a working computer system.
The United States is the only super power left, we can do anything we want, we don't have to care about what other countries think or worry about levees and pumps, new runways, more refineries, global warming, near misses at airports, better education, or competition from China and Asia. God Bless America!
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*Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, author and sociologist. He teaches at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona. His column on political, church and social issues appears each Friday in the Daily Southtown. Father Greeley's e-mail address is Agreel@aol.com, and his home page, which includes homilies for every Sunday, is agreeley.com . |
