Does Moore, Oklahoma need FEMA?

There are many ways a person can spend a Saturday morning that will bring enjoyment to their lives.  For me, relaxing with a cup of coffee, the newspaper and good conversation with my wife is at the top of the list.

 

For others it might be biking, sleeping in or playing baseball.

 

Today, I had the opportunity to spend my Saturday morning doing something totally different with people who normally are doing something other than what we found ourselves doing.

 

On this Saturday, I found myself donning a red stocking cap of some sort while making lentil stew dinners for complete strangers in my home state of Oklahoma.   With me were my sons, their good friend, members of my Little League baseball team, their parents and about 200 or so other private citizens for whom Moore, Oklahoma is but a dot on a map - but also now a place in their hearts.

In an amazing display of speed, efficiency and joy the people in the large room (donated by a for-profit business) worked with the staff of a wonderful charity called Feeding Children Everywhere in an assembly line that mixed lentils, salt, spices and rice into bags that were quickly weighed, sealed and packed - 96 bags to a box - in cardboard boxes. 

My group managed to make 768 bags - enough for over 2,000 meals.  Other tables did even more.

Next to the front door where stacks of donated bottled water which rested next to scores of bags of food that people brought in that morning.  Next to that food was a jar filling up with cash and checks to buy even more food for the 33,000 Oklahomans in need.

I asked one of the staff members when the food would leave for the Sooner State.  "Within days" was his answer.

All of this kindness - from Floridians to Oklahomans 2,000 miles away - reminded me of a story...

In the 1830's Congressman David Crockett was asked to vote on using taxpayer dollars to relieve the suffering of the wife of a deceased Naval Officer.  Congressman Crockett rose to the floor of the House of Representatives and said, “Mr. Speaker–I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him.

 

Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.” (Read more: http://www.fee.org/library/detail/not-your-to-give-2#ixzz2ULThzijs)

Which brings me to this point.

 

The people of my home state do not need FEMA.  They do not need to wait around for the slow process of federal aid.  They do not need to rely on the plunder of their fellowman.

 

All they need is the private charity that can only come from the care and compassion their fellow Americans are showing them now. 

 

Imagine how much more money and time we could give to other victims of other disasters if we did not have to pay income taxes.  From 1776-1913 we owed the IRS zero money and FEMA did not exist.

 

Through fires and floods and tornadoes and drought, private citizens helped their neighbors without the forced philanthropy that government has created.

 

Left to our own devices - and left with more of our hard-earned money in our pockets - the same would happen today at a much faster pace and with more love than any bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. could ever hope to show.