Don't Turn Away Yet

Our blogfriend the Rude Pundit seems pretty sure that a lot of the hurricane flooding today in New Orleans could have been avoided if developers would stop draining the swamps to build suburbs. He's not that happy about it.

Steve Gilliard, another blogfriend, worries about the fact that many Louisiana and Mississippi National Guardspeople are in Iraq and can't help out rebuilding levies that hold back rivers, the way the National Guard used to do. He's also quite justifiably angry that the people who died in the Hurricane were the people who were too poor to get away.

All of this anger reminds us of an angry liberal lobbyist we used to know. He got angry one day and refused to help lobby against a bunch of nuclear waste being dumped north of Las Vegas. Why? In his approximate words, "They voted for Bush, and the knew he was going to do this. So forget them."

People could say the same thing about the Gulf Coast, which voted for Bush again. It is possible to say, You voted for Bush, knowing he would send your Guard to war, knowing he would allow developers to do whatever they want, knowing that he would keep you poor. Now you're suffering because of your choice. Forget you.

To this, we can only say, Bush won the Gulf Coast, but it's not like he got everyone's vote. He didn't even get seventy percent. Thirty-some percent of that population is still a lot of people.

Lots of our frustrated liberal friends want to give up on the Southern States. We all need to remember that thirty percent of the population, though. The Southern liberals we know are some of the coolest people we have ever met. Let's not abandon them yet.

It wasn’t so long ago that Al Gore, Sr., thought that the South was going to end up the most liberal part of the country. He was proved wrong and unseated, but the seeds are still there. Juries in the South give plaintiffs huge cash awards against corporations; Southerners still stand up for the little guy, even when it’s trial lawyers asking them to do it.

It’s a region with many difficulties, not the least of which are biggies like crushing poverty, lingering racism, and high crime rates. But it’s also beautiful, and it will be worth Northern liberals’ while to think up new ways to help out our friends down there.