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| Sunday, October 30, 2005 |
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The missing ingredient 
| | I still think Katrina pushed a reset button on the country. Something turned then. Maybe it was just the left-right-left pendulum that had run out of rightward momentum anyway. Maybe it was something else. Not sure. |
| | ...on September 1, we couldn't conceive that the Katrina calamity could fade so quickly from our national consciousness. The White House probably understood that better than we do. |
| | Like it or not, Katrina's behind us, morphed into political maneuvering, fat contracts and trailer cities. The rapidity of the onset of our amnesia troubles me and so I've been thinking a lot about passivity in the face of important challenges. What Doc assumed - a tidal wave rather than ripples - did indeed flood our collective consciousness, for about a month. But then, unexpectedly, those of us with high hopes for a Web 2.0 solution to the Katrina disaster and its continuing diaspora, moved on to other matters. That's the real reason I posted my Clock is Running article a week ago Saturday. Most of us, myself especially, are unskilled at acting on a predetermined schedule, and we often don't recognize the promises we make in passing that are taken more seriously by others than by us. I believe that some proper community tools can help, but they haven't been built yet.... |
| | There's just one problem: the meeting, as evidenced by our wiki, hasn't catalyzed the grass roots activism we'd all like to see in response to the tragedy. |
| | There's much much more. This is stuff that matters. Read it. |
| | One might look at the struggles Britt describes, especially the rapid entropy around the commitment to build Recovery 2.0, as a failure of people, or technology, or something other than the only thing absolutely necessary to Getting Things Like This Done. Which is leadership. |
| | Thirty-four years ago I worked in an anti-poverty program in rural New Jersey. It was one of the Great Society programs started under Johnson and killed under Nixon; and with good reason, frankly. Most of the programs I saw, other than Head Start (which, among other things, got poor kids from bad homes into a loving environment and away from dysfunctional families for a few hours on weekdays), were a waste. The one exception was something called HOW-TO (Housing Opportunity With Training something-with-an-O). The program taught poor folks to learn construction, starting with their own homes, which they built with loans from the Farmers Home administration. It was run by a single-minded young guy named Andy Marshall. Far as I know, Andy had no life beyond HOW-TO, which operated out of a dead bowling alley at the south end of Greenwood Lake in exurban New Jersey. The houses were built by residents of an old iron mine community in the otherwise upscale town of Ringwood. These were people of mixed racial background, most of whose surnames were Dutch and whose ancestors were both Dutch and African. Most were terribly poor. Some had never been out of the county. Society on the whole had given up on them. But not Andy. |
| | I marveled at how Andy worked the bureaucracy, the politicians, everybody he could, to make the program succeed on its own terms. He would sit on the steps outside Senator Clifford Case's office until he got Action. He would work nights and weekends, calling politicians, public officials, newspapers and anybody else he needed, Make Something Happen. When every other program (including the one I worked for) got de-funded and closed down, Andy found money, business partners and political connections to keep HOW-TO going. He helped those poor folks learn construction and bootstrap the new homes they built. He got the story covered by New York TV and the New York Times. He gave 150% of his life to HOW-TO. And he succeeded. |
| | Anyway, I'm not knocking whoever was (or still is) in charge of the efforts Britt is watching fail (or fall into quiescence, or otherwise dissappoint). I am saying that efforts like this need a grade of leadership that's rare. In fact, Andy Marshall is the only example I can think of. |
| | This isn't to say nothing is going to happen with Recovery 2.0, and similar or related projects. Just that, if they are going to succeed in a Big Way, they need leadership. |
| | Maybe they have that, and I'm fulla shit. Woudn't be the first (and hopefully won't be the last) time. But that's how it looks to me at 11:30 on a Saturday night. |
But I can still help
| | i'm looking for a girlfriend am not fussy. i enjoy using the internet to find prettygirls. if anyone would like to go out with me for a date my email is roger_smalls@hotmail.co.uk. i am not free on tuesdays. |
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