Delia M. Rios: Americans Turn To Government Often For Help
"HELP US W"
You don't need to read between the lines of this plea to President Bush, painted in white block letters onto a street in Metairie near the 17th Street canal.
Some anonymous everyman or woman was asserting an American right: calling upon not only the government's resources, but its compassion. Congress already has paid the first installment on that claim, $62 billion in aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
It's the American way.
...
A sense of collective well-being is built into American democracy.
"That has been what's given us strength as a democracy -- we haven't said, 'To hell with you, you're on your own,' " says Leon Panetta, a former California congressman and chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.
Panetta remembers his own constituents living in parks after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. "Do you walk away from that?" he asks.
Our answer, time and again, has been no.
The Great Depression severely tested that resolve, and the government's response then shapes our expectations to this day. In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of a shared duty: "We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster." In other words, FDR added, "We all go up, or else we all go down, as one people."
The flooding of New Orleans badly shook this confidence. The desperate, left to fend for themselves, appealed to us directly on live television: "This is America!" They were voicing a civic faith that "we, as a nation, won't tolerate that level of chaos and deprivation," says Grant Reeher of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
It's a faith with deep roots.
Yale's Hacker notes that "the philosophy that government should always be responsive to the people" is reflected in the First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
In the early republic, says Harvard University historian Alex Keyssar, every town had an "overseer of the poor." The responsibility, though shared, was considered a local matter. The Civil War forced a different solution.
[Editor's Note: This is a short excerpt from a substantially longer piece. Please go to the Times-Picayune for more.]
You don't need to read between the lines of this plea to President Bush, painted in white block letters onto a street in Metairie near the 17th Street canal.
Some anonymous everyman or woman was asserting an American right: calling upon not only the government's resources, but its compassion. Congress already has paid the first installment on that claim, $62 billion in aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
It's the American way.
...
A sense of collective well-being is built into American democracy.
"That has been what's given us strength as a democracy -- we haven't said, 'To hell with you, you're on your own,' " says Leon Panetta, a former California congressman and chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.
Panetta remembers his own constituents living in parks after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. "Do you walk away from that?" he asks.
Our answer, time and again, has been no.
The Great Depression severely tested that resolve, and the government's response then shapes our expectations to this day. In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of a shared duty: "We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster." In other words, FDR added, "We all go up, or else we all go down, as one people."
The flooding of New Orleans badly shook this confidence. The desperate, left to fend for themselves, appealed to us directly on live television: "This is America!" They were voicing a civic faith that "we, as a nation, won't tolerate that level of chaos and deprivation," says Grant Reeher of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
It's a faith with deep roots.
Yale's Hacker notes that "the philosophy that government should always be responsive to the people" is reflected in the First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
In the early republic, says Harvard University historian Alex Keyssar, every town had an "overseer of the poor." The responsibility, though shared, was considered a local matter. The Civil War forced a different solution.
[Editor's Note: This is a short excerpt from a substantially longer piece. Please go to the Times-Picayune for more.]