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By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer
My Sister the Troll, also known as Rebecca, lost almost everything in Hurricane Katrina.
Becky lives on the west bank outside of New Orleans. She was unemployed when the storm hit. Her husband, Gil, has been too sick to work for years.
They didn’t have a lot to lose, but they lost it.
They fled to Alabama, then home to North Carolina, in a half worn-out car loaded with dogs, cats, birds and not much else.
I think they went home too soon, but armed with a little insurance check, bags of donated clothes and supplies, and gifts from a lot of nice people, they went home and got to work.
Gil couldn’t do much – he’s yet another example of why I need to quit smoking – but he worked harder than he should have.
They aren’t rich. They didn’t have much insurance.
And while they didn’t say no when the government offered them some help, they didn’t seek it out or whine when that help arrived late.
I think my Sister the Troll and her extended family are good Americans.
I’m not sure what to call the handwringers who want to blame the government for everything, including not stopping the hurricane itself.
While I have always been a supporter of our president, I won’t give him a pass here.
The feds didn’t do everything as quickly as they could have, as evidenced by my sister’s government trailer, which she gave to a neighbor. Her house was livable again by the time the camper arrived.
President Bush should have chopped heads a lot faster than he did, since his people weren’t giving him the information he needed, or working as fast as they should have. At the same time, the race-baiting mayor of New Orleans and the stuck-in-the-mud bureaucrats of Louisiana didn’t do near as much as they could have to prepare or help their people. A couple of them, notably the state’s governor, have already reaped the political hay of the field they sowed, and will soon have to find real jobs.
They’ve known for years they would face a disaster if a real hurricane hit, yet they did little or nothing to prepare.
Then we look at the folks in Mississippi.
Few and far between were the howls of racism, the televised cries of “rescue me, I can’t help myself” from those quarters.
I am sure most of the folks reading this column remember two little storms we had called Fran and Floyd.
When those storms hit, and the world seemed to flood, my brother, my folks, my wife and I worked around the clock covering the storm’s impact. I drove my old station wagon all across this part of the state, taking pictures and filing stories from places where a boat and a chainsaw were far more useful than a telephone and a computer.
Miss Rhonda was still in radio then, and she stayed on the air for eight and twelve hours at a time, relaying messages about water, road closures, ice, meals, and just about anything else people needed to know. We even found a Spanish dictionary and broadcast some grammatically dreadful, but vital information to folks who couldn’t speak English.
In each storm, we went two weeks without power. We boiled water on a campfire and an LP cooker. We cooked outside. We lived by candle and lamplight.
Our neighbors, such as they were, dealt with things the same way. And most of us worked together.
When someone’s driveway was blocked, we cleared it. When a road caved in, we directed lost travelers to a detour. If someone was able to cook a big pot of spaghetti, everyone within hollering distance was welcome.
The folks I wrote about and visited after Hurricane Hugo were much the same way. They welcomed what help folks offered, but they didn’t expect it. They pulled themselves up out of the mud and got to work.
I sincerely doubt anyone’s state worked less efficiently than our own after Hurricanes Fran and Floyd, but most folks didn’t rely on the state or Uncle Sam for help. They rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
And here we are, a short time away from the next hurricane season, and folks in the Big Easy are already howling how they aren’t ready.
Tough. Neither were we. Neither were the folks in Riegelwood who are still dealing with last fall’s tornado, but they, too, are working together and solving the problem, rather than pointing fingers.
Forgive me if I seem intolerant of the noisy victims of Hurricane Katrina. I don’t have much patience with professional victims. I feel the people whining and hollering about conspiracies and the government’s failure to help them should just hush.
Had these folks not been so reliant on the government in the first case, their circumstances might be somewhat improved. I do not blame them for being hit by a hurricane – I blame them for sitting on their hands and expecting someone to take care of them. Most grownups know better than to trust a red-tape infested bureaucracy to do anything in a hurry.
Plenty of folks stood up on their own two feet, despite the horror of it all, and dealt with the problems they faced. They didn’t necessarily have any more money, or training, or advantages. They just spent less time posing for the TV cameras, and more time working.
If my Sister the Troll, with her family’s health problems and her lack of financial resources, could take her home from a shell to finished in six months – and then get a new, better job – then why the heck can’t these other folks?
If the folks of North and South Carolina could start rebuilding weeks before federal money started rolling in, then why couldn’t the folks in New Orleans? Their neighbors in Mississippi did.
Shoot, a friend of mine who went on one of the relief trips to the Delta State told me how a pastor of one church told the crew to keep going on to the next town.
They had one building intact, and a pitcher pump to a sweet-water well. They were okay.
There was a time all Americans felt that way.
I only wish my sister’s neighbors across the Mississippi could remember that, too.
– Weaver is a staff writer at the News Reporter. He may be reached via e-mail at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz, or via telephone at 642-4104, ext 227.
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