The Frankfurter School

Disaster scenes in our own country are becoming all too-familiar to Americans. The dramatic photos show people forced out of their homes seeking shelter, massive property destruction and often death. The recent pictures coming out of Iowa City last week call up memories of Hurricane Katrina but with an all-white cast of characters. These weather-related disasters cannot be definitively linked to global warming, but they are the results that models of global warming have predicted, and the “debate” over the issue roils on. What is missing from the public discussion, however, is the idea that it is not weather alone that has caused the magnitude of the destruction. Levees failed in Iowa City too, ones that the Army Corps of Engineers identified as faulty in 1993. Our country’s infrastructure is unfunded and unsafe, and is the direct result of “trickle-down” economics ushered in by President Reagan, and then universalized by the “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” Clintons in the 1990s.

Since 1980, fiscal conservatives have pretty much won the battle of ideas with a simple formula of “government = bad” and “you work hard and should get to keep all your money.” What this ingenious marketing campaign did was to convince Americans to allow the 25-year dismantling of the entire regulatory system and public infrastructure in the United States, so proudly built during the New Deal. The very very wealthiest Americans have gotten wealthier by several orders of magnitude, but the merely well-to-do (on down) have not seen their taxes become substantially lower. The overall impact has been to leave this country with a welfare system that was taken away from people and handed to corporations. In the collapse of our infrastructure lies opportunity for growth, privatization, and profit for a select few. In its wake lies broken levees, collapsed bridges, collapsed mines, fallen cranes and contaminated food.

A new narrative needs to be created to re-build the society that we had for most of the 20th Century, in which government played a necessary role in protecting us from harm, whether it comes from nature, neglect or profit. When we focus only on the individual being responsible for himself, many may live well, but at much greater cost to their neighbor. When we make sacrifices for our common good, we all live richer lives.
Weather is random and unpredictable, but only when and where it occurs. The consequences on real people of weather disasters are largely preventable or at least can be greatly mitigated. We are going to see climate change and disease bring ever-greater numbers of casualties closer and closer to home. We need to stop seeing them as random acts and make all of the appropriate causal connections, not just by dutifully recycling and buying hybrids, but by changing the way we think about the values that our society is built upon. We are much better suited facing our problems together than as individuals and must connect that narrative to everything that we do.