Column One

Here's what really counts

They're still trying to bail themselves out of the devastating floods that overwhelmed our neighbors just across the (state) border down in Louisiana. Talk about wiped out: The Dickerson family once lived in a three-bedroom house on a private road in a nice neighborhood in Denham Springs, La., where the kids had plenty of room to play. But now the family has had to take refuge at the crowded Highland Inn, where the parking lot next to a truck stop is the nearest thing to a playground the kids have.

According to the Associated Press, all these refugees have bonded together to take turns cooking in crockpots to share meals, babysit each others' kids and look after the old folks who live with them. Dirty dishes wind up being washed in bathtubs; brothers and sisters have to share beds as 18-wheelers shake the thin walls. On this Thanksgiving, Ashleigh Dickerson was thankful that FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is paying for the two rooms at the motel where the family has taken refuge because her husband Jimmy can barely afford the rent on his $800-a-month disability pay. (He's got a degenerative back condition.) Tens of thousands of houses in South Louisiana were damaged or destroyed during the deluge, which left some parts of that state under two feet of water.

Daniel and Angie Howell, together with their seven kids, share two rooms and use a third to store their stuff. They pass the time waiting and waiting for their landlord to fix up their rented house. "They're so sick of being here and trapped," she said of the kids. Who wouldn't be? "I hate the idea that we're going to be staying here for Thanksgiving and Christmas."

The family started off on the motel's second floor though her husband, a paraplegic, had to drag himself--and his wheelchair--all the way up the stairs to get there. He's got Lou Gehrig's disease, formally amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. "There were days that I never got out of bed except to go to the bathroom and move around the room a little bit because I was in fear of falling down the stairs." Happily, they've been moved to the ground floor now that the motel has finished fixing them up. Luxury it ain't.

The whole neighborhood is short of housing, which means rents have soared. Everything else may have been overturned but not the age-old law of supply and demand. "We have nowhere to go," Daniel Howell noted. "This is our last hope."

Yet these folks could do a lot worse than to put their faith in family, which remains what it has always been: the basic unit of society. And in what they mean to each other by now. For they've been united by their common hardships. Ask anybody who's ever shared a foxhole with another GI, or even the same prison cell at some Stalag or another in a German prison camp for POWs. The Dickersons and the Howells, for another sterling example, have found strength in each other and in sharing their common travails. "There's no way we couldn't be friends," says Ashleigh Dickerson, "after the hard things we've been through." Together. You might even call them one family by now.

The Dickersons and Howells emerged from this watery mess like the first generation after Noah stepped out of the ark two by two or so, but without a rainbow in sight. Or anything else. Scanning the skies, they saw no dove bearing an olive branch, let alone a dove. But only more rain clouds. Yet they held on to hope--and faith. Faith in each other and in their creator.

Wherever such faith comes from, it's a miracle. Please don't tell us the age of faith has passed; it's just been succeeded by another age of faith. Man is so constituted that he always remains a believer--whether in a faith that's worthy of him or in one that's not. He may believe in Reason or the Workers Paradise or some shining, inevitable future on the far horizon, but believe he will, if only in the latest, fashionable ideology--or perhaps nothing at all. Yet even his cynicism can be fervent. But for our little money, he could do much worse than family.

Jimmy Dickerson said it well when speaking of his own hard-pressed family. "We're together. That's the main part. We're OK."

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 12/04/2016

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