Like most of the people in the blogosphere, I’ve been watching the horrors on the Gulf Coast, and in and about the city of New Orleans. I’ve refrained on commenting on them for a week or more now, because adding my voice to the ever swelling chorus seems futile and pointless. Other than a snark or two on random sites, aimed mostly at posters who couldn’t tell a hole in the ground from any body part you care to name, I’ve remained silent and watching. And, to tell the whole truth, crying a lot at night for the souls down there who have lost so much.
As I write this, we are just a little more than a year from the 2006 elections. This is when we are going to have our first chance as a nation to begin to set things right on a macro scale.
If you are anything like me, dear reader, you have sat aghast in horror at the lack of timely response. Unconscionable acts of omission have occurred. The USS Bataan, which followed the storm towards New Orleans, and was onsite off the coast with its fleet of helicopters and 600 bed hospital, just a few scant miles away, the very next day- sat completely unused. Why?
The President strums a guitar at a ‘photo-op’ while people are drowning in their attics in New Orleans. Why?
Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary of State, is shopping for expensive, trendy, luxury shoes in a trendy NYC store while people are making shoes from cardboard and rubber bands to protect their bare feet in Louisiana, having lost their own to a poisoned stew of floodwaters. Why?
The Vice President of the United States has pulled yet another of his disappearing acts while people in Biloxi ponder the disapppearance of their homes, jobs, neighbors, friends and loved ones. Of course, his company is going to get a fat share of the rebuilding contracts. Why?
The Director of Homeland Security cannot tell the difference between a State and a City. Why?
Individuals trying to help other human beings are turned back at gunpoint. Why?
Even the administration’s tame news network, Fox News, seems to have finally gotten the point. How bad must the truth really be?
Hundreds, if not thousands of stories are coming to light now, and will continue to do so. The real stories are not about ‘looting’ (which I put in quotes because I don’t feel that scavenging in an abandoned supermarket for food should be in the same class as dragging a flat-screen television out of a Wal-Mart), or even the heartbreaking stories about individual losses of life, separations of families, or even the heroics of a few. We will all see and hear those stories as they are told, as they should be.
The real story here is, and should be, the depraved indifference and incompetence of the Administration in handling this crisis. It boggles my mind that anyone outside the affected areas could and did have better information on the magnitude of this disaster via the Internet than anyone in public office apparently did. The disconnect between reality and the obvious perceptions of the administration is obvious, vast, and incomprehensible.
This disconnect, or wanton disregard of the facts, is plainly obvious to anyone with an eye to see it. Are these the people we are trusting to “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”?
In 1776 a group of our forebears revolted against another leader named George, citing, among other offenses, the following:
He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury
For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses
I could stretch it to include a few more, but I’m not going to.
Qui tacet consentit – he who keeps silent, consents. I will do neither.
*Stands up and applauds.*
Very well said!!!