If you lived in Louisiana, what you think about government would depend on where your home was, wouldn't it?
Butte La Rose is one of dozens of small rural communities in and around the Atchafalaya River Basin being flooded this week to spare population centers in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Officials are slowly opening Morganza Spillway gates to relieve pressure on the Mississippi. It's part of a plan developed in the decades following a catastrophic flood in 1927 and used now for only the second time.
Critics of government action where it is doubtful there should be government action (such as, oh, me) often say that all government does is decide who the winners and losers will be, which is most often a pragmatic decision rather than a philosophical one. In this horrible but grimly compelling flood-watch season, we can see how ominous that power to decide really is. If you live in New Orleans or Baton Rouge, we're there for you. But if you live out in the Cajun Sticks, well, screw you. Why are the property and welfare of the ones being sacrificed less worthy than the property and welfare of the ones being protected?
I understand the logic and the reasoning and the calculations used. A little is being sacrificed to save a lot. The more easily replaced or restored is being sacrificed to protect the harder to replace or restore. The population density of cities creates not only a greater physical infrastructure but also a greater sense of regional identify. When our great cities are threatened, we feel especially vulnerable and diminished.
But though such decisions can be justifed, or at least credibly defended, they shouldn't go unexamined. People choose to live in those cities, after all, so they should be willing to accept the risks as well as the advantages. And there is something perverse about continuing to spend billions and billions to protect and rebuild and protect and rebuild again a city that pretty clearly seems to be in the wrong place.
