Marco Rubio, a Flooded Field and Individual Initiative

On Friday afternoon the sky was heavy; the temperatures were high and so was the humidity.  It would be impossible not to know what was coming.  The rain started at 6:00 p.m. and continued for the next 12 hours.  Five inches of rain fell that night. 

We live in the Rio Grande Valley, only 80 miles from the Gulf of Mexico.  The land is flat, low and prone to flooding.  Our retirement community is built around a common land of a little over 2 acres.  Usually this ground is a beautiful green area where birds abound, the dog-walkers bring their pets to play, run and do their, “doggy” thing.  Friends take their exercise, visit with neighbors, and enjoy an afternoon of ease on a porch with a great view.  That all changed in a night. 

Saturday we woke to a sea of gray water under a gray sky.  The water was eight inches deep in the field and a good five feet up our driveway.  The homes at the lowest end of the park had water all the way to the back of their property.  Slow, steady rain continued throughout the day.  If you were going out in your car you had to guess where the road was and move at a crawl, lest brown water form a wake that sent debris farther under homes. 

It is now a full week from the day that the rains began.  The water did not leave our driveway for five days.  Water still stands in the field, but only in the lowest parts.  We can see the roads, though the margins have water.  We are starting to clean up. 

The catalyst for this improvement, gradual as it was, was the institution of water pumps, moving the water from the field and through the fence to the agricultural land behind our park.  Two smaller pumps, acquired locally by management, were augmented by an industrial pump provided by a member of our park who had spent a lifetime working in the oil fields.  That man and a small crew of helpers have tended those pumps day and night.  They were followed by a host of volunteers from the park who started shoveling, pushing, and raking debris away from homes—not just their homes, but the homes of others. 

No one sat on their hands and waited for help from some amorphous entity called, “the government.”  No one assumed that solutions would have to come from a higher authority.  We are a working people who believe that solutions lie in our hands.  We are not professional, “victims.”  No one owes us anything.  Help is what you ask for when your own mental, physical and emotional resources are at an end, and we earn help by first helping ourselves.  This is the difference between people who see themselves as change agents in their own lives, and people who have given over their lives and freedom to the government.  

The people I have seen at work in this park are the proud heirs of frontier thinking.  I saw an immediate connection between their actions in this very small corner of America and what I heard Marco Rubio say in his announcement to run for President: 

“I’m humbled by the realization that American doesn’t owe me anything.  But I have a debt to America I must try to repay.  This isn’t just the country where I was born; America’s literally the place that changed my family’s history.”    

Rubio is now in my top five because he keeps the faith.