A black eye for the Red Cross
Just past the Wildwood boardwalk — with its deep-fried Oreos and chocolate-covered bacon, t-shirts deifying The Donald and putting Disney princesses in mugshots, amusement rides and redemption games — is the beach and then the Atlantic Ocean, the literal end of the road.
We’re half a block away, sharing with another family a four-bedroom house that would be a mansion in the city. I’m not complaining, but it’s running about as much to rent at the end of the summer as our home south of Prospect Park, by no means a mansion, would go for any time.
My wife asked our waitress at the Crab and Seafood Shack, which brings its crabs in three times a week from Maryland, what happens when summer’s done and the likes of us leave. The waitress said she’ll stick around to collect unemployment and occasional work off the books since her boyfriend’s got a union job at the convention center in Atlantic City.
“There’s government jobs, and sometimes construction for men. Most people lay low, get by and maybe get high. Some people live off the ocean.”
We were at the Shack the day President Obama praised “the first responders and people helping each other out” in Houston. “That’s what we do as Americans. Here’s one way you can help now,” he said, offering information about how to donate to the Red Cross, whose relief efforts after major disasters have traditionally been worth about as much as the stuffed animals you “win” at the boardwalk.
My grandfather, who rarely talked about his World War II service, recalled how the women of the Red Cross let enlisted men languish while plying chocolate and cigarettes on officers.
After Katrina, the group raised a fortune in part by promoting an emergency number those in need could call. It rang endlessly, since they didn’t get around to finding people to answer the supposed hotline.
I saw firsthand their workers at Ground Zero racing to be first on the scene when news cameras arrived as the group kept raising money off of 9/11 long after they knew they wouldn’t be spending it here. Surely plenty of Red Cross volunteers and workers did honorable work, but I didn’t see them.
After the earthquake in Haiti, the Red Cross raised half a billion dollars, with little sign of any of it being put to good use there.
After Sandy, I again saw firsthand the group’s feeble but TV-friendly efforts. Later, ProPublica reported that 40% of the charity’s available trucks were diverted from delivering help to serving as backdrops for news conferences.
After Isaac, one driver reported that Red Cross trucks, supposedly filled with relief supplies, drove around empty, so it would look like they were delivering help.
Obama isn’t responsible for Trump, but good and upright people in the establishment continually vouching for a relief operation that isn’t built to respond effectively to catastrophes but raises money off of them that helps pay its executives’ swollen salaries is one reason a carnival barker managed to get himself elected President. Trump didn’t let his first natural disaster go to waste, using Harvey as cover for his pardon of unrepentant and undeserving Joe Arpaio.
After Sandy, I ended up in Staten Island for a few days, along with a crew of volunteers delivering supplies to neighborhoods that the city, the feds and the Red Cross still hadn’t helped. My cousin ended up in Coney Island, where the members of a Hatzolah ambulance crew refused to help her when she couldn’t prove to their satisfaction that she was Jewish.
My brother was in the Rockaways, getting food and medicine to old and sick people stuck in high rises without working elevators. A group of military veterans, called Team Rubicon, helped arrange those efforts along with Occupy Wall Street veterans working as Occupy Sandy. They proved far more successful than the Red Cross or the government in no small part because Palantir — the spooky Silicon Valley-funded private spy operation — gave Rubicon free access to information and triage systems they’d developed for the U.S. military in Iraq as a way to betatest those systems here.
Back in Staten Island, there were mountains of drywall and house guts on the streets just after the storm as people furiously ripped out soaking rot before the government or insurers could note the damage.
It’ll be years before the out-of-sight mold left behind starts sickening new owners.
So I’m on the Jersey Shore, watching the waves and thinking about all the people doing heroic work in Houston now, and the people piggybacking on that work to raise money. About how we work to build and maintain a society with institutions that actually help one other, at a time when the White House looks like the other house down the road, the one in Atlantic City.