Dealing with Hurricanes Katrina & Rita

This year's hurricanes have displaced hundreds of thousands of Americans who need food, housing, and cash, but what they need most of all is jobs. Our government should act immediately to put these displaced Americans in the jobs now held by illegal aliens. President Bush should announce an immediate crackdown on employers of illegals and set up a hiring database to match up the unemployed with jobs.

Our guide for dealing with the disaster should be Dr. Booker T. Washington's speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895. Known as one of the most memorable and influential speeches in American history, it is just as timely today as when it was given.

Dr. Washington started by telling the story of a ship lost at sea for many days. When it sighted a friendly vessel, it sent a desperate signal from its mast: "Water, water; we die of thirst!" The friendly vessel signaled back, "Cast down your bucket where you are." The lost ship signaled again, "Water, water; send us water!"

Again the friendly ship sent the message, "Cast down your bucket where you are." After a third and fourth such exchange, the captain of the distressed vessel finally heeded the injunction and cast down his bucket. It came up full of fresh, sparking water from the mouth of the Amazon River.

Dr. Washington then admonished members of his own race to cast down their buckets "in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions." He cautioned that "in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands. . . . Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities."

Booker T. Washington then gave a stern message "to those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South. . . . Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth."

Booker T. Washington had a dream of bringing "our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth." He called for "that higher good that, let us pray God, will come in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law."

Dr. Washington's speech wowed his audience and was widely reprinted in newspapers all over the country. A faraway Boston newspaper editorialized that "the sensation that it has caused in the press has never been equalled."

President Bush should stop looking for "willing workers" from other countries. We should cast down our bucket in America and guide these displaced Americans to jobs held by those who have no right to be in our country.