Rebuilding

We're Better at it Than We Think We Are!

We all know about the great Chicago fire and its alleged bovine beginnings. But how many of us are familiar with the fact that in 1904, that's 104 years ago, the business center of Baltimore was totally destroyed by the Great Baltimore Fire.

So here we are a couple of years past the havoc wreaked on New Orleans by Katrina. This aticle in City Journal: The Big Easy Rebuilds, Bottom Up caught my attention. Father Nguyen The Vien's story is worth hearing. This Vietnamese clergyman worked to bring his community together and used their church building as a base to support individual efforts of his congregants to rebuild their houses. This article by Nicole Gelinas is a good study of how government can help [or hinder] such efforts and how sometimes the best thing to know is when to get out of people's way. I suspect we learned a lot of this 104 years ago.