Wall Street, Main Street, and then that other world - Railroad Street by General Russ Honore

[Ed Beakley]

Severe crisis levels the social status/wealth/political party/race playing field to a lowest common denominator - survival. Reflecting upon America’s birth, Ben Franklin’s words at the signing of the Declaration of Independence apply - “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Throughout this year I have been honored to have included inputs from General Russel Honore (United States Army, Retired) - Commander Joint Task Force Katrina on Project White Horse 084640. Once again his words on Martin Luther King Day point to what it will require to be a resilient community - a resilient America:

I think in the spirit and soul of MLK , we should remind the leaders of this great nation that we have three “streets” in America not two… The third street in America is “Railroad Street.”… As we celebrate the great accomplishment that will occur tomorrow, let’s use the power of the message in the coming days and weeks, to shed light on the realities of life on “railroad street.”

Resiliency will most certainly require all three streets with common outlook, common interest, with mutual respect to work as one. Please see the link to RC#24 Wall Street, Main Street, and then that other world - Railroad Street on My Page RSS Feeds

[Dag von Lubitz]

Unless the issues of Railroad Street are addressed rapidly, problems of national security and defense will persist. Each time a disaster happens, the Main Street manages. Maybe just "somehow," but still...The Railroad Street does not have the luxury of "somehow." Their lives, dependent on meager incomes, always hang in the balance determined by sheer luck and nothing else, their possessions vanish, and once the media find another sensation to milk for ratings, the interest of the nation (world) vanishes. The poverty just gets worse, the squalor becomes more intense, and the sense of abandonment grows. Is there a better spot to execute an act of bioterrorism than in Railroad Street, where health insurance is a pipe dream, where coughing will be always considered as "normal", and where a person lying unconscious in the street will always be thought of as "another homeless drunk"? Is it really surprising that gangs find their homes on the "other side of tracks"? We, who live on the right side of the railroad, persist creating the breeding ground for violence, crime, and outbursts of rage by failing to address the most basic issue of restoring dignity and future for those we prefer not to speak of in the gentrified cafes of Main Street. Several of our senior military officers pointed out time after time that terrorism did not "just emerge," but is the result of disastrous socio-economic factors that the West created "out there," and that unless we, as a global society, address the underlying causes, we hardly stand a chance. The fact that it really is bad has been pointed out in the latest report of DNI on national and global security in which disastrous healthcare in the Third World has been, for the first time, designated as a security threat. Not only because of potential pandemics starting in the impoverished territories of the world, but also by the now unassailable connection between health and economy whose failures lead to increasingly violent dissatisfaction that rapidly transforms into terrorism. Security, resilience, and survival depend in reality not on how many guards we post and how sturdy our fences are, but on how rapidly we demolish Railroad Street and bring its inhabitants back into the Main Street.