Gov. Roy Cooper meets with a Hurricane Helene first responder (Pool photo/Paul Barker-Governor’s Office)
In 2010 I published “On the Grid,” a book about infrastructure and the systems — water, wastewater, power, gas, telephone, communications — that made our absurdly easy lives possible. The systems everyone affected by Hurricane Helene is now desperate to see restored. The systems Milton is about to demolish in central Florida.
Anyone who knows anything about these systems will agree: they’re enormously complex, and they require at least vast government regulation or, as in the case of most water and wastewater systems, outright government ownership.
The book ultimately was, I said in presentations I gave at the time, a love letter to engineering, government, and taxation. The last two, of course, reliably drew boos from those present.
So, I responded, in larger presentations, by cueing up a video of Ronald Reagan’s famous repetition of the old joke about the nine most terrifying words in the language being “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Then I would ask: What does a Navy SEAL say after killing Osama bin Laden? What does a first responder say when stabilizing you at a car wreck? What does a food inspector say when keeping rancid beef off the shelves? The person who checks the nuclear plant for radiation releases? What does the person fixing a sewer leak in freezing weather at 2:00 a.m. say?
“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
I would finish with the jackpot question: What does a FEMA worker say when pulling your aunt Louise out of the second-story window of her flooded home?
That question is of course once again heartbreakingly relevant.
I doubt I changed any minds; when I did a TedX talk about the book the TedX people even cut the Reagan part out when they released the recording of the presentation. They felt criticizing Reagan’s dangerous and damaging joke was too political. As if claiming that government services were a prima facie bad idea was somehow not political.
I hope we’re questioning that claim every second right now. Because that foundational modern Republican claim — that government is bad at anything it tries to do and is ultimately simply a wicked, freedom-destroying thing — has nearly killed us. We’re within a month of finding out whether it’s done the trick.
I have lived in North Carolina for three decades, and I have lived through many a hurricane and tornado, including those that have brought FEMA services to our communities. And I know from experience — as all sensible people know — that when the wind and rain stop, and the trees are down, and the streets are flooded, and the water is questionable, and the stores are closed, and you just do not know what’s next, what you want is the government. You want FEMA, you want the National Guard, you want law enforcement. You want to see a stream of vehicles driving towards you with bottled water and cots and blankets and emergency cell towers.
I’m far from the only person to have noted that Helene provides an opportunity for a well-timed show of good-government public service, reminding people that without government, and the taxes that pay for it, with the empty freedom that the anti-government right claims it offers, we end up like some of the people suffering in western North Carolina right now and the people about to be stranded in Florida: separate, terrified, alone.
With government, we get things like helicopter rescues and emergency public library Wi-Fi and disaster roaming. Nobody is saying that neighbors with chainsaws or mule teams don’t help or that the United Way and other nonprofits don’t help. The point is there’s your neighbor with a chainsaw and there’s the National Guard, and the two are not the same.
You can recognize the importance of the service by listening to the complaints. The same politicians of the right who fight against government service and taxation in every form are now complaining that government leaders are currently failing in their response to Helene. It’s a lie, of course; Georgia governor Brian Kemp publicly thanked President Biden for the national response to Helene, as has our own governor, Roy Cooper.
This is a moment of choice for every one of us. What kind of disaster response do you want? Remember the abandoned prisoners after Katrina? Remember Trump tossing paper towels in Puerto Rico? Remember Trump withholding disaster relief from our own state of North Carolina (with our Democratic governor) after Hurricane Matthew?
Or do you like the model where you get C17s full of supplies landing at the Asheville airport for FEMA distribution and emergency cell towers and opposition-party governors thanking the president for the quick and thorough response in the face of unimaginable devastation? Where everybody gets help, not just people the president likes?
The question is existential. We like to say in recent years, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” Well, we can’t have them if we won’t pay for them, and we can’t have them if we don’t recognize that without them, we are ruined.
The current administrations of the nation and our state are putting on a clinic for how you do this — and why it should never be political. Meanwhile some candidates are openly lying about the success of this difficult job, because if the government is doing a pretty good job helping people and saving lives, as it manifestly is, it renders their entire value system laughable.
As you prepare to vote next month, you should probably think hard about how these things are run when the inevitable next catastrophe hits and it’s your window you’re hoping some FEMA worker pulls you out of. You should think about what the candidates and their parties think about government.
And whether it’s here to help.