How to Really Help

You can't have missed the horror that is New Orleans right now, but all of us are helpless for the most part to help in any way besides giving money. The Red Cross needs your money, and Instapundit has a list of other charities to give to if you want to give somewhere else.

But Hugh Hewitt has written a column that is brilliant and, I think, inspires hope. Hewitt is trying to organize an internet-driven and internet-centered effort to catalogue all the needs that are going to emerge from this thing, and to have one central webpage where people can sign up to help meet those needs:

It is a task which may be beyond the ability of the local, state, and federal governments to manage. How, for example, does a government--at any level--presume to assist a shattered church in the reconstruction of its walls and its Sunday School programs, an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in the care of its members, a community theater in the reconstruction of its playhouse, or scores and scores of high school athletes in the completion of their senior year schedules so that colleges and universities can offer talented kids a chance at a free education?

The only way such a multitude of specialized needs can be met is for the vast, vast numbers of their counterparts across the United States to act--independently of government--to come to their aid in a reconstruction effort.

N.Z. Bear, one of the most innovative entrepreneurs in the blogosphere, has agreed to help organize the launch of such an effort. If a particular organization in the devastated region--a PTA, a youth soccer league, a Presbyterian Church, a garden club, a cooking school, a literary magazine--decides it wants to ask for help, that appeal will be listed on a special page, which will get quite a lot of traffic as the country's bloggers publicize opportunities for people to help. Sometimes the requests will be for cash. Other times they will be for the sort of specialized help that only similarly situated people can provide. The fact is, the needs will be so different and so voluminous that it is impossible to predict what will come up. The second fact is that there are millions of Americans who would like nothing more than to help. Connecting the need with the volunteer at the level of specificity required is a solution that the web allows.

Hewitt says that the blog The Truth Laid Bear has agreed to be that clearinghouse, but the page has not been set up yet. Stay tuned for details, and keep praying for these people.

Meanwhile, if you don't read anything else, read this piece by the L.A. Times on conditions inside the Superdome. It's the best written piece I've read so far. And it ends this way:

One man was lying partway on a cot, his legs flopped off the side, a forgotten blood pressure monitor attached to his right arm. Some people had wrapped plastic bags on their feet to escape the urine and wastewater seeping from piles of trash. Others, fearing the onset of disease, had surgical masks over their mouths. An alarm had been going off for more than 24 hours and no one knew how to turn it off.

Suddenly, incongruously, the first notes of Bach's Sonata No. 1 in G minor," the Adagio, pierced the desperation.

Samuel Thompson, 34, is trying to make it as a professional violinist. He had grabbed his instrument — made in 1996 by a Boston woman — as he fled the youth hostel Sunday where he had been staying in New Orleans for the last two months.

"It's the most important thing I own," he said.

He had guarded it carefully and hadn't taken it out until Wednesday afternoon, when he was able to move from the Superdome into the New Orleans Arena, far safer accommodations. He rested the black case on a table next to a man with no legs in a wheelchair and a pile of trash and boxes, and gingerly popped open the two locks. He lifted the violin out of the red velvet encasement and held it to his neck.

Thompson closed his eyes and leaned into each stretch of the bow as he played mournfully. A woman eating crackers and sitting where a vendor typically sold pizza watched him intently. A National Guard soldier applauded quietly when the song ended, and Thompson nodded his head and began another piece, the Andante from Bach's Sonata in A minor.

Thompson's family in Charleston, S.C., has no idea where he is and whether he is alive. Thompson figures he is safe for now and will get in touch when he can. In the meantime he will play, and once in a while someone at the sports complex will manage a smile.

"These people have nothing," he said. "I have a violin. And I should play for them. They should have something."

Lastly, I can't help noting the distinction between conservative and liberal blogs. While Hewitt, Michelle Malkin and Instapundit blog the heck out of the Katrina aftermath, working to organize fundraising for relief and coming up with ideas like Hewitt's for long-term reconstruction, (which will be the greatest need) the Daily Kos is a total contrast.

One of the top liberal blogs highlights the faults in the government's response, and then posts a column by EJ Dionne that argues the opposite of Hewitt's point:

this is a moment in which individual acts of charity and courage, though laudable and absolutely necessary, cannot be enough. It is a time when government is morally obligated to be competent, prepared, innovative, flexible, well-financed -- in short, smart enough and, yes, big enough to undertake an enormous task. Not only personal lives but also public things must be put back together.

Kos then airs some more "angry voices" from New Orleans, which prompts hundreds of comments such as, "When did Bush ever care about the poor? As long as his life is not at stake... they all can die for all he cares."

Kos then posts on Iraq, and then moves on to suggest that President Bush was lying when he said that no one expected the levees to be breached. He then posts approval ratingan on the president, commenting, "Bush isn't coming out of this unscathed."


There is a link to a move-on site focused on providing housing for refugees. But then Kos goes on to boast that he was right to say that Katrina is a worse disaster than 9/11.

Finally, Kos complains that Pat Robertson's charity is getting federal money to help the victims.

Kos has no solutions, no innovative ideas, no hope, and makes almost no effort to help. All he has to offer is complaining, personal promotion, and pessimism. There seems to be more hate for Bush and the government than there is love and compassion for the victims of Katrina.

I hate to use such a tragic event as an example, but I think this sums up the substantive difference between the modern left and modern right in today's society. The left represents, by and large, the fruits of secular humanism, while the right is enlivened and energized largely by evangelical or evangelical-type Christians.