On Brookline

Visiting the Dark Place of False Hope.

“I would not give you false hope on this strange and mournful day, but the mother and child reunion is only a motion away.”  - Paul Simon

Among the images coming from the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one stands out.   Pictured are a woman and her grandson as they learn that the boy’s mother has perished in the flooding.  At first glance I can’t tell that the pair is wracked from grief (if not for the caption below, I mistake them as triumphant).

It’s not just the facial expression that belies their pain.  The grandmother is wearing a T-shirt that is an abstraction of the American Flag – the rough edges of red and white stripes below a field of blue.  Nearly a week after thousands were left to drown by a government whose main mission is to attend to the needs of the wealthy, might she being holding on to the mythology of the current crowd in Washington as best equipped to protect us?  Her apparent expression of faith in the American ideal (that, above all else, we take care of our own) is incongruous with the stark reality.

Oh, we take care of our own all right.

The American ideal once held that we organize government to protect people, their property and their liberty.  A government that provides the means for all to develop their full human potential by putting laws in place to provide for the common good and to protect the minority from the majority.

That was lost when the electorate traded it in for the jingoistic patriotism and the political exploitation of the poor and suffering under Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s.  Sure, we talk of “safety nets” and ending “welfare as we know it” (meaning we might commit to it in a different form).  We hear of “compassionate conservatism” and “affirmative access” by a new breed of sloganeers.   Today, caring for the ravaged means casting them as members of a disaster scene photo op and then casting them adrift after the cameras have gone.

I’d like to have the copyright on the word cronyism when the story of the start of this century is written.  And cronyism is everywhere.  We find it on a spectacular scale, as in the head of FEMA rising to his post on virtue of being the former director’s college roommate.  Or with the head of the US Marshal’s office in Boston, whose qualifications for appointment are as a driver for former Governor Paul Cellucci.

Here in Brookline the Board of Selectmen appointed the manager of a local real estate office to a committee reviewing local zoning regulations.  Did it matter that the gentleman appointed did not live in Brookline?  Not to the selectmen.  He was pulled from the roster after I asked about his residency, with the town administrator thanking me for the “heads up.”

In my first column on these pages I wrote that, engaging town government often draws a reaction like that described in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds on half the nations; and with fear of change perplexes monarchs.”

Those in power fear what they don’t understand, especially when they are of a single mind.  So I wasn’t surprised when Selectman Nancy Daly responded to an inquiry on St. Aidan’s by saying, “Frankly, I am shocked that you and others members of the press are constantly diverted by the complaints and issues raised by a small group of neighbors to this project.”  Maybe if she and other town officials took the time to listen these folks (instead of holding unilateral talks with developers), the project would not be in court.

Maybe if those in Congress listened to the pleas of the engineers warning that the levees were going to burst, thousands of lives might have been saved.  Maybe if government’s chief enterprise was something other than doing sweetheart deals, we might avoid the disastrous twilight looming in health care, education and job creation.

So out of touch is our ruling class that the insufferable matron of the Bush political dynasty can survey a shelter of storm evacuees and say, “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this…this is working very well for them.”

Underprivileged indeed.  Those who died and are homeless did not have the privilege of transportation – or a place to go - to escape the storm.  They were without the privilege of a government agency populated by something other than political hacks to lead the rescue.  Or the privilege of political leadership that will accept blame for their incompetence rather than deflect it.

All brought into focus by a suffering matron who had the privilege of visiting the dark place of false hope, with only a lousy T-shirt to show for it.

This column first appeared in the Brookline TAB on September 8, 2005.