David Brooks: The Storm After the Storm (worth a read)

[liberalpragmatist]

Once in awhile, David Brooks says something genuinely worth reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html

Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history, it's striking how often political turbulence followed.

In 1889 in Pennsylvania, a great flood washed away much of Johnstown. The water's crushing destruction sounded to one person like a "lot of horses grinding oats." Witnesses watched hundreds of people trapped on a burning bridge, forced to choose between burning to death or throwing themselves into the churning waters to drown.

The flood was so abnormal that the country seemed to have trouble grasping what had happened. The national media were filled with wild exaggerations and fabrications: stories of rivers dammed with corpses, of children who died while playing ring-around-the-rosy and who were found with their hands still clasped and with smiles still on their faces.

Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today's illegal Mexican immigrants - hard-working people who took jobs no one else wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting off dead women's fingers to steal their rings. "Drunken Hungarians, Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins" a New York Herald headline blared.

<snip>

Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

[speedoo]

1. One of the few RW'ers I have some respect for.

He has a brain and a conscience. He is a genuine conservative, unlike the bushistas.

[MissMarple]

2. If his thinking wan't so shallow, damn. He could be ever so much better

than this.

[Old and In the Way]

3. Johnstown was a man-made disaster.

The coal companies kept building coal sludge dams further and further up the valley. Finally, one broke and it had a cascading effect.

Of course, the coal companies called it an "act of God".

[yellowcanine]

4. Actually it was a recreational dam "maintained" by wealthy industrialists

from Pittsburgh. They had summer cottages around the dam. Some of the owners were coal company bigwigs but it was not the coal companies per se that were the culprits.

http://www.johnstownpa.com/History/hist19.html

[Pendrench]

5. I believe that David McCullough wrote a book about this. n/t