Latrobe, Pennsylvania – I am thankful that the monster Category 5 Hurricane Milton was reduced to a more typical Category 3 by the time it made landfall in Florida, and a much weaker Category 2 shortly thereafter. The monster turned out to be significantly less bad than Hurricane Helene just before it. I joked with one of my director Priests that I had spent all day before landfall begging God, “For the sake of just 10 righteous men…” (My confirmation name is Abraham).
I have no doubt that the power of prayer played a huge role in reducing this kraken of a storm into a much more manageable raging bull. I have long believed that nature, itself, is far more violent and volatile than we give it credit for. So long as we were a Christian nation, prayer and faith took off the roughest edges of it by the extension of God’s vitiating hand to reduce the violence. When we, as a society, effectively told God to mind His business and get out of ours, He finally obliged – and we feel the full force of natural disasters.
The numbers seem to support that hypothesis. Contrary to the myths promulgated by the climate cult, over the last 60 years, the number and intensity of hurricanes have diminished rather than increased. Paradoxically, particularly in the last decade and a half, they have hit populated areas more frequently. They are milder in number and intensity but worse in their impact on people. But thank Gaia no child is allowed to say the Lord’s Prayer in school, eh?
God is speaking to us in little whispers right now. When we quiet down we may be able to hear Him. The truckers, rednecks, and hillbillies who have dropped everything to get out and help their fellows are currently the people listening most attentively.
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When I was the managing editor of a group of newspapers in the Chicago area, a common newspaper trope in winter during a lengthy snowstorm was to publish a picture of workers asleep in their plow trucks. I never published such a picture, nor allowed any of my subordinate editors to do so. I knew very well that, in such times, workers were covering vastly extended shifts, some working near round the clock. The very idea of pampered little ninnies like us, who were sleeping in their toasty beds at night, mocking the very people making that possible disgusted me.
There is no doubt that the federal government and its “services” are in terminal meltdown. It has become a voracious, yet pitiful giant, incapable of doing much of anything except shaking down its victims (the citizens) for more dough. That is the logical end of all bureaucracies. Though it seems paradoxical, the workers in the field of any bureaucracy charged with service are usually the last true believers in the bureau’s original mission. Yet because they are the first line of contact with the public they bear the brunt of public discontent – while the administrative and political masters who twisted the bureau’s mission evade accountability.
So it is with FEMA. The men and women working the trenches are, largely, people who genuinely wanted to help people in crisis – and still do. They are not the people who decide how resources are going to be allocated or where they are going to be directed. That is a political and administrative decision. As it has reached an advanced stage of decline, the people in the trenches serve as both a punching bag for the public and a buffer to take the punishment due to those who politicized it in the first case. It comes down to leadership.
Without strong leadership committed to original principles an ugly spiral of dysfunction takes place. Lay people generally only have a vague notion of how an agency is designed to work. When it starts faltering, because they do not know the specific way it works and the limits on field agents, lay people often express their frustrations by making wild – and usually errant – claims. If you have sound leadership, it hears these claims and listens for what they mean, not just what they say. It means that serious problems are arising somewhere along the chain. Good leadership seeks to find what the problems really are – and works to fix them. Bad or politicized leadership simply gets defensive and transmits that defensiveness to the people in the trenches, ridiculing the wilder claims of critics. If the latter is the case, the situation keeps getting worse. Lay people keep getting more frustrated, the agency gets ever more dismissive of any criticism, and it finally explodes into the kind of ugliness we are seeing right now with the Helene relief.
FEMA took its first serious hit during Hurricane Katrina, which badly damaged New Orleans in 2005. Much of that was politicized, criticism leveraged by Democrats to wound the then-hated George W. Bush. The dilatory antics of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans, keeping federal help out until after it had already reached disaster level, played the biggest role. That didn’t stop those officials from blaming FEMA and Bush for the disaster they initiated. It was easy to dismiss internally as just politics because, largely, it was.
When FEMA officials and their political masters should have first taken serious notice and remedial steps was in the disastrous and massive tornadoes that ripped through southern Oklahoma City in 2013. There were many available reports of victims, when approached by FEMA workers, refusing aid and waiting for private relief agencies. You didn’t see it much in the press because Barack Obama was now president and the press, above all things, had to protect its precious from criticism. But I had several friends on the ground there – and they reported the same widespread phenomenon. If the agency had recognized it had a real problem then instead of just ridiculing the overheated claims of FEMA camps and coffins, it could have righted the ship. I question whether the leftist administrators wanted to right the ship – or whether it occurred to them that this could be a useful political tool…and the grunts in FEMA could be made to take any resulting heat for the administrators.
I have a source in FEMA who had been a regional administrator for some time. He told me that it has descended, at the top levels, into utter chaos. More poignantly, I have a good friend – a solid, Christian man – who is a midlevel FEMA operative. We had a chat about this situation. He was genuinely wounded by the firestorm of criticism it is getting – and genuinely angry about the “lies” about FEMA. The man is a true believer – and truly wants to do good, and so gravitates to others who want the same. He does some system work to improve responses, but is not in a political position to direct how and where resources are to be logistically allocated in crisis. He has good cause to be offended by the overheated claims targeting FEMA but, at the same time, his anger at the same has blinded him to the reality that it has not been working right for over a decade – only getting worse and more politicized.
This is typical of a culture in catastrophic decline. People in crisis get more and more angry at the impotence of FEMA, the agents on the ground are the handiest people to vent that frustration on – even though they are the most idealistic and least responsible for the problems, the idealists on the ground get angry at being demonized, and so everybody gets angrier at everybody – and the people who are the real authors of the problems muddle blithely along, happy to let the folks in the trenches fight with the victims in the trenches. It is a sorrowful thing that won’t end until there is real political accountability for the decision makers at the top levels.
On the bright side, I have been greatly enthused by seeing people band together where they are to help each other. As the expectation that government will – or can – do anything effectively erodes dramatically, people are accepting the mantle of responsibility that they must help their neighbor. This is the early stirring of the sort of real community that I have been talking about. The novelist, J.A. Jance, (one of my favorites) has a saying that permeates many of her stories: “If it is to be, it is up to me.” It is a rejection of the futile, fruitless bewailing of misfortune and, instead, taking up the responsibility to make the things that need to happen…happen. I think much of our society is, finally, collectively deciding that, “if it is to be, it is up to me.” That attitude will carry us through a lot worse than this storm.
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You may have heard of the brave FBI whistleblower, Marcus Allen, who blew the lid off of some of the FBI politicization of J6 – and the retaliation for revealing it. What you had not heard, until now, is that Allen has been a friend of CORAC for a couple of years now. He is a courtly gentleman, soft spoken and kind. I had not said anything until now because he was in a pitched battle with the FBI to get his back pay and security clearance returned. I figured the last thing he needed was to be identified as a friend of a Christian activist group. But he has won his battle now.
I suspect his very courtliness encouraged the yap dogs who currently occupy the seats of formal power to think he was weak. They have found, to their sorrow, that the strongest men do not feel the need to bark all the time.
I will see him shortly after the first of the year. When I do (or maybe before) I will ask him to do an interview or a guest column. I think maybe an interview. You will be very impressed with him – and thankful that such a bold and honorable Christian man was protecting us all for a time. (That is probably why the politicized new FBI was so desperate to get rid of him – because he was protecting us.)
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You probably heard about the professor at the University of Kansas who said, in class, that men who won’t vote for Kamala Harris ought to be lined up and shot. That professor has now resigned.
But you may not have heard that the Kansas City Star, the city’s major daily newspaper, published a column saying it didn’t want to hear any MAGA whining about the professor’s murderous statement. Seriously?! If you say Kamala Harris is dumb or Tim Walz is a weirdo who likes to lie a lot, the gutter press starts clutching its pearls and screaming its head off. But when a professor says that it is not enough to assassinate Trump, all his supporters should be killed, too, that same gutter press tells us not to complain about it.
No matter how much you loathe the establishment press, it is not enough. “Advocacy journalism” isn’t journalism at all. It is just an outlet for vicious, dull-witted hacks to vent their spleens and pretend to be enlightened. I pray that the modern advocacy journalists are all washed away in a great upheaval, that the business is completely destroyed, to make way for a rebirth of honest reporting once more.
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While I wrote most of this in Latrobe, I’m actually posting it from southern Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay. I had a rather vigorous four days.
If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.
Find me on Twitter at @JohnstonPilgrim
The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)
18208 Preston Rd., Ste. D9-552
Dallas, Texas 75252
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