GELFAND’S WORLD - Indiana has been pounded by rains that resulted in widespread flooding. While the rain was still coming down, it was announced that the Trump administration had OK’d federal relief funding. In the meantime, as every major news outlet has announced, the Trump administration has been withholding federal relief funding from blue states – by which we mean, states that did not give electoral votes to Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
What we have here is a new, cold version of a civil war. The enemy – that’s us – is being punished by the current administration for the “crime” of voting for the other person. That makes it something opposite to democracy. We’ve seen similar results when other right wing issues came up. Remember when red states were talking seriously about arresting any woman who attempted to leave their state to get an abortion in a free state? It wasn’t so long ago, was it?
I’d like to offer a suggestion to the congressional delegations of our blue states: You should be talking to the delegation from Indiana right now. And the day after, you should be talking to the delegations from Florida and South Carolina and Alabama and Mississippi. And you should be telling them that someday – maybe quite soon – the Democratic Party will take control in the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate. And one day, perhaps as soon as January 20, 2029, the president will be a Democrat. And here is the punchline: If a Republican president is going to withhold aid from blue states hit by natural disasters right now, then some sort of retribution is going to be required. If Indiana and other red states cooperate in this new civil war, then our side has to respond.
How that response is tailored is yet to be determined, but it could be as simple as making sure that all that overdue aid to damaged blue states has to be paid first, before any aid to any red state is even considered. And if this happens right in the peak of the 2029 hurricane season, it would be a tragedy, but the red states have the opportunity to forestall that tragedy right now.
It sounds harsh, but think of it as responsible parenting on the part of blue states.
What should not be acceptable is for congressional delegates from Indianapolis or Mobile to ignore presidential actions that do real damage to their fellow Americans. And if they continue to look the other way, they should be made to understand that their inaction has consequences.
Demagoguery coming from the other side:
Let’s imagine that some government agency had reacted to the Boyle Heights fire by insisting that the property owner remove a million pounds of frozen food from the ruins every single day! Critics of big government would have jumped right in, calculators in hand. Even making the wild assumption that a single truck could carry twenty thousand pounds of food waste, that would require fifty full truck loads a day, which means that workers would have to load two to three trucks every hour, which would of course keep the remaining neighbors awake for most of the night.
And what if there were some complication, such as the need to shore up a sagging roof structure or the need to guarantee that a shelving complex holding a quarter of a million pounds of food was stable enough to be unloaded? Delays would obviously ensue.
Of course the virtue of demanding the removal of a million pounds of food refuse a day is obvious: The job would get done in just under three months – 85 days to be precise.
So what did mayor Karen Bass do? Did she make that 85 day demand?
Those of you watch the tv news will already know that she made the following demand: Get the food waste out of there in 45 days! So there it is. Bass demanded twice that level of achievement. Just under twice a level that most of us would have considered reasonable.
What’s interesting is that the owner of the property did a pretty good job of complying with the mayor’s demand. Crews have been demolishing the structure and shipping away waste and debris about as fast as the city streets can accommodate them. The mess is, according to the owners, more than 90% gone. So what level of gratitude has the mayor shown as of the weekend?
Well, it’s hard to call it gratitude. Mayor Bass went on television and complained that she had given them a 45 day deadline to get the structure completely cleaned out, and they were not done. She sounded irritated and demanding.
We have a word for this kind of conduct on the part of elected leaders: Demagoguery. She is reacting to an almost miraculous level of compliance with petulance.
Remind you of anyone? Maybe someone whose ego demands that the incompetent resurfacing of the Washington D.C. reflecting pool be blamed on somebody else? Let’s call the failure of the reflecting pool “vandalism” instead of recognizing it as the inevitable result of corrupt favoritism in government contracting.
In either case, we have a politically motivated response that presents itself as public irritation but really involves the unwillingness to recognize physics and reality coming into play. Or put it this way: Suppose you had a contract with somebody to rebuild your kitchen in 15 days, but due to complexities it is now going to take 20 days. Most people would grumble but live with it. And if this were taken to court, the judge would ask the contractor, “How quickly can you get this job done?”
And even now, there seems to be some vagueness in the defined amount of allowable time to get the burned out site cleaned up, at least as far as the owner is concerned.
I’m going to switch gears just a bit here and bring up a related but somewhat different approach to this question. It’s got to do with emergency preparedness and our ability to deal with a major earthquake or heat event or flood – and with the now-present climate change, any of these could happen on any day.
Should there be a major earthquake along the southern San Andreas Fault, there will be widespread damage to roads and bridges. Power lines will go down across city streets and state roads, making travel temporarily impossible. Water mains will be damaged, resulting in the loss of water pressure in much of our area.
Under such circumstances, it will be important to be able to distribute food and water to ten million people. And that’s where refrigerated food storage facilities and well-built reservoirs come in. We need them in the case of an emergency, just as we need them to feed our people in non-emergency, day-to-day operations. Someone may wish to make a similar argument regarding stocks of petroleum and gasoline.
There is a complicated and substantial argument about moving our economy towards a sustainable model that no longer secretes megatons of greenhouse gases. That argument is legitimate and should be engaged in more aggressively. But while making this argument, we have to consider carefully how to stay alive in the urban environment.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
