Rebuilding the Gulf Coast, One Community at a Time

"Rebuilding the Gulf Coast, One Community at a Time."

September 1, 2005 07:29 PM EST

NZ Bear has decided to keep his focus on the mbuttive participation of bloggers in the blogging for relief effort through the end of the long weekend. It isn't reasonable to keep Glenn tied to his typepad through Monday night (what yeoman's --er, yeobloggers' service these two have provided) but we can all keep posting links to Glenn's mbuttive link list today and NZ's site to keep our audiences focused on the variety of ways to respond to the disaster.

In a column for tomorrow's WeeklyStandard.com, "Rebuilding the Gulf Coast, One Community at a Time," I announce that NZ has agreed to help me launch an experiment that hopes to use the internet's capacity plus the talent and good will of bloggers to match specialized needs with specialized volunteers. I have been thinking this through all week, and am convinced that the epic nature of the loss, and the daunting challenge of rebuilding the incredibly complex communities of the three states will not be possible via top-down direction once the essential crisis needs are met. A new model is possible, and the web will allow it to happen.

One example. The Presbyterian Church, USA has a long and pretty good record of responding to disasters. At the website for Presbyterian Disaster buttistance there is a letter to interested volunteers which is straight out of the old top-down model. It boils down to "tell us if you have a team of volunteers, and we'll match you to a need in the next few months."

In the days of restricted information flows, this approach made sense. It doesn't anymore.

buttume there are 10,000 Presbyterian Church, USA congregations around the country, and 100 in the devastated regions. Rather than a group of people in Louisville collecting --and controlling-- info flow, the PCUSA headquarters team ought to post a list of the churches in the area on the web, and ask the PCUSA's 9,900 other congregations to select one of the 100 and establish contact. Sure, some of the affected churches would get more responses than they need, but very, very quickly, each of the distressed church's staff would have between ten and 100 PCUSA partner congregations around the country upon which they could call for needs and prayer. Right now. Not three months from now. By weekend's end.

Right now people urgently want to help --want to establish contact with victims and volunteers in the area. If facilitated right away, those connections will mature and deepen into hugely effective networks. Only headquarters will have to give up control to make it happen, though as MarkDRoberts' congregation's quick embrace of Canal Street Presbyterian Church in the heart of New Orleans demonstrates, motivated churches and innovative pastors and lay leaders are unlikely to wait for direction from HQ on how to proceed.

Though this will be very threatening to heirarchies, I hope that they will quickly see the extraordinary value to be gained by stepping out of the way and encouraging such self-organizing partnerships as a means of really getting the work begun now, and crucially, getting hope kindled quickly in these devastated communities.

It is fine and a little rebutturing to know that Louisville is committed to working on the project.

It would be so much more encouraging to have the names of the churches, the e-mails from the pastors and staff, the concrete promise of financial and other forms of buttistance flowing in, and the names of prayer partners. That's concrete. That is so much more real than knowledge that a committee is collecting names of volunteers.

Time is of the essence. In fact, if congregations matched with congregations right now, some families without a place to stay might find themselves a home for the next few months. All sorts of needs could be met once the connections get established.

The same dynamic will apply in a thousand different settings. Now if only the old heirarchies who enjoy their status and their control realize there is a much better way of doing things.

More tomorrow. Mark Roberts has a post up on the subject. I would love to hear from folks directly on what they think of the idea, and perhaps some Another pastor has asked me to solicit need requests from unaffilaited churches along with key facts about the congregation, such as size and mission. I'll post what comes my way as NZ works on the page.

I am proud that the Chapman University Law School where I teach is opening its doors to some of the law students displaced by the disaster. I am sorry to see that my alma mater, the University of Michigan Law School, is not yet listed.

I am pleased that at least one Ivy has opened its doors, Cornell, to displaced undergrads. I am shocked that my alma mater, the richest university in the world, Harvard, does not appear to have invited any students of any sort to take refuge there.

HedgeHogBlog's big law firm has staked $100,000 in an employee matching fund. I hope Lowell publicizes those other big firms that follow this lead.

And when will a politican dip into their campaign funds to add to the relief efforts? When such a transfer occurs, send me a link.

I am getting scores of e-mails asking me to blast away at the collective scream at George W. Bush raging through some of the lefty blogs, some Air America talkers, and some MSM talking heads. For the time being when there is so much immediate need, I think that most of my time and effort is best spent on mobilizing as much support and publicizing as much innovation as possible. Time enough to deal with the absurd charges later. After the emergencies are dealt with, the scale of the effort and the vastness of the response will speak for itself, and the failures of various structures will get vetted.

I will simply note that I am confident that many of these critics will find themselves in a position very similar to that of many of the speakers and most of the crowd at the memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone in the fall of 2002. The speakers and the crowd that night were full of pbuttion and conviction. They were sure they were right, and the echoes of applause and cheering came back at them and they were convinced they had made huge persuasive points with America. I am sure Jack Cafferty and many other of what Michelle Malkin called the "arm chair first responders" on the program today are quite certain of their own virtue, the president's terrible culpability, the impeachment that will surely follow, and the political realignment this will all lead to.

They are sure of it.

I am sure they are having their memorial service moment, and that the country is indeed watching everything very, very closely, and drawing very different lessons about who they would want managing the relief effort if disaster comes to their city or region.

Time will of course tell.

But the one thing that is truly low is the diminshment of the heroics that have been underway since early Monday morning and which continue at this hour, whether in the Coast Guard helicopters, the patrols of National Guardsmen in the city who have been there on duty for for hours and hours already, for the engineers scrambling to find a fix, for the bus drivers and the Dome workers, the medical personnel and the thousands of unnamed, unselfish, and now slighted federal, state, and local workers who are giving their all.

Arthur Chrenkoff is keeping a list. (HT: Powerline)

-- There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves. - Will Rogers