How did we get to this point?
I received an email just recently from a lady who wrote “My house survived this flood with just 7 feet in the basement… a couple more inches and it would have been on my main floor.” My first reaction was boy, did you dodge a bullet and you were fortunate compared to many fellow citizens. But this simple email kept me up for most of the night. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. How is it that one can take relief from the fact that their house “survived” a flood with “just 7 feet of water in the basement”? How did we get this to weird place where we have become so complacent that a mere 7 feet of water in a basement is in some strange way acceptable because it could have been worse? How? Because we let it happen.
We let it happen every time we witness an injustice and sit back and allow it to continue because we “don’t want to get involved” or because “that’s just the way it is”. We let it happen when we allow our elected representatives to represent their party rather than represent us. That’s not the way our forefathers intended this to work! We let it happen every time we allow government or its agencies (what we called “The Man” back in the ‘60s) to treat us with total disrespect and disdain….every time we accept this institutional violence, we get weaker and they get stronger (and believe me, it has become an “us” versus “them” battle). We let it happen when we don’t speak out even when we know we should be screaming from the roof-tops!
Our mayor, who may well be the most courageous man I know, spoke of this institutional violence at our August 9 Flood Victims meeting. He was referring to a speech made by Robert F Kennedy the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968. The following is an excerpt from Kennedy’s speech as reported in an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer written on the 40th anniversary of the assassination. His entire speech is online and well worth the read.
“The second type, institutional violence, is more insidious because it is concealed in our traditions and accepted as the cost of commercial and political freedom. This violence, he said, is ‘indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger — and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.’
Both types destroy our common humanity. ‘Whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children,’ he said, ‘the whole nation is degraded.’ In this way violence fractures our civic commitments and weakens our communal spirit.
‘We learn at the last,’ Kennedy said, ‘to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear.’”
“Violence fractures our civic commitments and weakens our communal spirit”.
Boy ain’t that the truth! Government counts on it….weakening us and breaking us. That’s why they do studies. That’s why they “buy time” because with every passing day the pain and suffering inflicted on us grows more dim in our collective memory. And with every passing day there is a far greater likelihood that we will readily accept whatever crumbs may fall from their table and be thankful for it. That’s the master plan. It works for them every time.
We anxiously await the Flood Mitigation Report (the very name is evidence of what I said above…”mitigate” not “eliminate”…apparently that’s good enough?) It better deliver the goods!
Al McPhail
Perth-Andover
