In 1938, my grandfather was a technician for Ma Bell. On September 21 of that year, the Great New England Hurricane, or Long Island Express, came ashore, the most powerful storm ever to hit the Northeast. It is estimated that the storm was Cat 3.
As it churned through New England, it caused massive damage to buildings, trees and, you know it, power and telephone lines. My grandpa was one of many technicians sent to the area to rebuild switching systems.
He was there, working dawn-to-dark, seven days straight, for more than six months. The absence put a great strain on his marriage, nearly ending it, I've been told.
With a small army of techs, working like fiends, Bell System was able to get rudimentary service back for major areas within a few months, but real recovery for the region was a process of years. According to wikipedia, downed trees and damaged structures could be found in the storm's path as late as 1951.
The mind-boggling extent of the damage had a profound effect on Connecticut financier Prescott Bush. During his time as a US senator, he drafted legislation to strengthen the Army Corps of Engineers authority and funding for dealing with storms and flood control, a profoundly different view of the issue than that of his grandson.
When I hear certifiables like Eric Cantor and Ron Paul say things like disaster relief will be blocked unless there are budget cuts to match the expense, or that FEMA is a needless government agency, I think of my grandfather and his mates, toiling day in and day out, to begin the process of rebuilding New England's telephone system. I think of the uncountable worker-hours and dollars spent getting that region back on its feet and the lasting value of improvements made to roads, bridges, buildings and flood control systems during the rebuilding process.
And find myself wondering just what these people think America is.
If a guy like Bush, a man so willing to put money over country that he stayed in business as Hitler's American banker until the president told him it was probably better not to be business partners with a regime we were at war with, if a guy like that could see that part of the government's job is helping rebuild devastated areas after disaster, even invest in prevention, it's safe to say that such ideas represent sane, mainstream American thinking.
Holding disaster relief hostage to partisan ideology or proposing its elimination altogether do not.
What has happened to the Republican Party? More importantly, what has happened to America, that it would allow such people anywhere near the levers of power?