Back in September 2008, Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, TX, and devastated the island. Galveston was my home, and I still consider it so, despite living now in Dallas.
I remember making my way down 3005 right after the hurricane. The once busy island was like a scene from a Fallout game. Devastation was everywhere. Entire buildings that once defined the Galveston seawall were missing or torn apart. The roads had chunks missing, and watercraft littered the area. I can remember one house looked like it had been vivisected, and I could see inside. Miraculously, the room had stayed more or less intact despite being exposed to the elements. It was a child's room, and the plastic Disney VHS boxes were still on the shelves under a television.
But the thing I remember most is that the island was more or less empty. The only people who inhabited the area were emergency workers and various members of their families, organizations that were helping rebuild and move debris, and that's about it. My father was a police officer there at the time, so I was allowed on the island. It was a ghost town except those few people.
I also remember how FEMA was there, but we couldn't figure out why. They were hardly doing anything. They set up some tents, but they might as well have set up some lawn chairs and started tanning for all the good they did. FEMA was slow, inept, and borderline useless.
“[FEMA's] response is completely inadequate. People are very frustrated, and frankly, they have every right to be," said Harris County Judge Ed Emmett at the time, and he was right.
But the thing is, we didn't sit around waiting for FEMA to start doing anything. We were doing it all. We were cleaning up each other's homes, feeding each other, giving each other places to sleep. It was a wasteland, but I can remember our community was never tighter. We would cook food and sit around after a long day, filthy and smelly, and laugh and joke with one another. We'd wake up in the morning and see companies like Georgia Power working on the lines. The question of "When will the government help us?" wasn't even on our minds. We the people had a problem to fix, so we fixed it.
The aftermath of Ike solidified in my mind that government is hardly necessary. Americans are a resilient people who, when other Americans are truly in need, will rise up to become heroes to others. It's an interesting quality that Americans have that some other cultures don't. They wait around for orders from the government, hoping that help comes from them soon. Americans just do it. It's a common phenomenon that I think we don't think too much about because it's just something we're so used to at this point, but it truly is an incredible American quality.
I tell you this story because you saw it again during Helene. FEMA and the federal government were useless, if not detrimental, to the rescue efforts of Helene's victims. The federal government's most notable contribution was disrupting rescue efforts to let Kamala Harris get some photo ops on the ground. It was the people and private organizations that really showed up and did the heavy lifting.
From all reports so far, it would have been far smoother and more efficient if the government had just stayed out of it, especially since the federal government's priorities seem to lie with non-Americans.
(READ: Does the Biden-Harris Response to Helene Prove It's Insidious, Incompetent, or Both?)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seems to understand this. As my colleague Teri Christoph reported on Tuesday, DeSantis is already writing off any "help" that Harris is looking to provide:
"And so for Kamala Harris to say the my sole focus on the people of Florida is somehow selfish is delusional. She has no role in this. In fact, she has been vice president for three and a half years; I've dealt with a number of storms during this administration and she has never contributed anything to these efforts. And so what I think is selfish is her trying to blunder into this."
It's good to remember Reagan's old quote where he said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
At this point, with FEMA's funds reportedly exhausted due to it dedicating nearly all of it to illegal immigrants and rescue efforts only being slowed or stopped if and when federal officials show up, the best thing the people can possibly do is shrug off the federal government and rely on each other.
Americans are the help Americans need, not some governmental body that clearly doesn't have the people as a priority, especially during an election year when photo ops will be more important than actually helping people.
Citizens act faster, are more organized, and are more connected to the people as they are of the people. The government is technically a foreign entity that is often disconnected and even sometimes oppositional to the people on the ground.
Florida's people will need help, but help is already lining up to help. It won't be wearing government uniforms, at least federal uniforms. They'll look just like the people. They won't arrive in government craft, but civilian trucks, riverboats, and private helicopters.
The people will save the people, because that's who the American people are, even if many of us have forgotten that.
God is with the people of Florida, and so is the rest of America.
