Headlines of problems and tragedies generate cries for piles of cash to fix everything – now!
Throwing cash around generates good feelings, but follow-up reports reveal a different reality.
After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, caravans of house trailers quickly headed south for the thousands of families left homeless … only to hit a traffic jam with government regulations forbidding placing said trailers in some areas. The caravan detoured to and parked in Hope. Recently the federal government funded another pile of money to pay for the ongoing storage, protection, maintenance and repairs of the unoccupied trailers.
New Orleans’s homeowners who refused to wait on government red tape and simply went ahead and began cleaning up and fixing up with their own muscle power and limited resources began renewing their lives while government owned trailers slowly rot in central Arkansas.
The federal and state governments do not stand alone in this failure to provide.
The fall of the Twin Towers triggered an avalanche of gifts totaling a billion dollars contributed to the National Red Cross for lives directly touched by the terrorists. Five years after the fact – having distributed less than 20 percent of those funds to designated recipients – the Red Cross began phasing out most of its assistance programs. According to The Associated Press, by the end of 2007, the Red Cross will distribute the remaining 80 percent of the funds to more than 100 nonprofit agencies that provide a range of services to families, rescue workers and affected residents.
After the tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, governments around the world promised financial assistance.
A year later, Fritz Institute, a San Francisco non-profit group, found that, depending on the area surveyed, 78 to 100 percent of the tsunami’s subjects still lived in tents or temporary shelters. Less than half of the $1.8 billion received from American donors had been spent in the first nine months. One small example of big plans and small application: The Red Cross promised to build 15,000 homes in Sri Lanka – two years later they have built 121 homes.
Small, unknown groups have out performed the big charities in building permanent shelters for tsunami survivors, according to the Sri Lanka Express a year after the tragedy.
And, it is not just major crises at which we toss funds.
Last summer Congress and the nation as a whole were puzzled over the illegal immigration problem. Proposals for solving the problem included building a Berlin Wall style barrier along our entire southern border at an estimated cost of $8 billion. While a fence along the most populated areas has reduced illegal immigration to one-sixth of what it was, one gapping hole lingers: Seven elaborate underground tunnels remain largely intact – because filling them in would cost about $2.7 million, according to Customs and Border Protection officials.
The border agency’s entire 2007 budget is $7.8 billion – not enough to fill the tunnels according to spokesman Michael Friel. Cement plugs worked – until tunnel diggers cleared a side tunnel around them. Smugglers have even taken the concrete used to plug tunnel openings and used it to reinforce walls and ceilings in new tunnels.
Traffickers have used one tunnel at Nogales, Ariz., three times in four years, said Agent Michael Cano, a Border Patrol spokesman.
No one wants to authorize spending less than one percent of the cost of building the proposed above ground wall between the U.S. and Mexico to fix the hidden underground routes.
Problems make headlines, but real solutions don’t.
Real solutions begin with individuals and small groups of just plain folks showing up to clean up the mess, build a new house or to dig a detour tunnel.
Heaps of money without carefully thought out and administered plans for its use and distribution make a big show. But even then, experience shows that the efforts of dedicated individuals and/or small, on-site organizations – too busy doing something to worry about record breaking headlines – provide the best results.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.)