Hitting Bottom

Hitting Bottom
By David Glenn Cox



When I was young and the world appeared as a new place to me, my mother passed away suddenly. My father, without his wife of thirty years, turned to alcohol for solace and overnight I became part of the wreckage of his life. A painful reminder of what he once had and had lost. Being sixteen it was impossible for me to understand what he was going through. He took a new job a thousand miles from our past to start anew.

As his drinking got worse I was forced from the house. I heard about a center that offered counseling at no charge and that’s what I needed, help from objective adults. I sat and explained to the counselor about my situation and he listened very sympathetically to my plight. Then I asked him, “What can I do?”

He shifted in his chair, tapped his pencil on the desk thoughtfully, and then answered, “Nothing, there is nothing you can do. You must wait until he hits bottom.”

“What?” I responded.

“You can’t stop someone with a drinking problem. They must be allowed to hit bottom.”

I wanted my money back, even though they hadn’t charged me. I felt cheated, I had just walked two miles to see P.T. Barnum’s hoodo. I began to understand how the residents of Berlin or Dresden must have felt in the last days of the war, just trying to dodge the bombs and make it through one more day.

Direct TV was broadcasting live Houston television coverage during and after hurricane Ike and some of the stories were harrowing. Many people who had every intention of leaving the area were caught by the huge storm surge. Some stayed behind with elderly and infirm relitives. Many misjudged the ferocity of the storm and its surge; some were guarding property and some were just dumb. But now there is almost a media blackout of the area, FEMA has learned from their past mistakes. Rule one for a successful relief effort is to keep reporters away. That way when you hold your press conference and tell everyone how well things are going, no one can argue with you.

As with Katrina, there are stars and villains, but with the media fog I have been hunting on the web for current local information. I ran across a message board that made me think back to the counselor tapping his pencil on the desk. A kid pours out his troubles and he gets answers like, “Gee, that’s a tough one, beats me!” Rather than messages of support or of assistance there were messages of racism and hate-filled comments of class distinction.

“It’s your own fault, should have evacuated when they told you”

“What part of having at least a three day supply did you not understand? You should not rely on the government to take care of your needs. At some point you need to be responsible for your own needs and yourself. I think the way they are handling the situation is great. I am tired of people not taking the news serious then get upset that their needs are not being meet to their satisfaction.”

I had heard one survivor tell the story of evacuating his family and staying behind with his elderly mother who couldn’t be moved. He told of the storm surge and standing on the dining room table. They asked, “Do you have any supplies?”

“We did until the windows broke out, then they were floating all around us.”

From the message board: “I want my $2,000 FEMA Debit Card like the poor got in New Orleans.”

“How do we know that those folks lining up for free supplies are even Texans?”

You might think that there would be concern for their neighbors or their fellow man but instead they’re worried about someone gaming the system out of a couple of bags of ice and some MRE’s. Some claimed the storm was the Lord’s vengeance, others claimed it was the residents' own fault for building there in the first place. FEMA was a favorite topic: “Government is not expected to wipe our noses when we get a cold, we are supposedly adults and some people need to take responsibility for their own safety.” And then there's: “They ain’t homeless, those were beach houses!”

When did America become such a mean-spirited, hateful nation? That we would begrudge storm survivors relief supplies after a disaster? What’s next? Someone falls off a pier and we yell, “You should have learned to swim!”

Perhaps emergency rooms can begin screening patients. “You’re fifty pounds overweight and you’re having a heart attack, guess you should have thought about that when you were hanging out at Baskin Robbins, sucking down that rocky road!”

Of course this story isn’t new; when the housing crisis began it was the homeowners themselves that duped mortgage brokers and real estate attorneys into selling them homes they couldn't afford. On Tuesday vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin proclaimed from the podium, “I’m glad that the federal government didn’t bailout AIG!”

AIG didn’t want a bailout, they wanted a bridge loan to give them time to sell assets. But to Palin it was better that tens of thousands be financially ruined than to offer help. I guess her message would have been, “Weren’t you warned to read the prospectus carefully before investing?” Reports circling Wall Street claim that the impetus to save AIG came from overseas. The Federal Reserve can’t save the banking system by itself and an AIG failure would have caused bank failures in Europe and Asia. What’s the answer, tell them too bad for you? Maybe instead their answer to us would be, “Too bad for you, America!”

Maybe the counselor was right. Maybe you can’t stop a person or a society that is driving headlong towards its own destruction, convinced that it's everyone else that’s got the problem.

“My wife and I sat on our deck and ate the hamburgers we cooked on our propane stove and then watched Monday Night Football on our TV as the generator hummed in the distance. We drank cold beer and had a good time because we planned ahead and didn’t depend on the government.”

As frustrating as it sounds and as frightening as it may be, we must hit bottom before we can begin to rebuild.

before they get the message. Some people die because they will not accept the message.

But the mean-spiritedness--that's something that Reagan brought to national prominence and acceptability. It wasn't like that before, even when Nixon was communing with the portraits. Reagan was the first bump on the first step....