Spike Lee's documentary is on HBO for the second time. When I first watched it, there was too much to absorb. Even now, it is overwhelming -- but the truth of the subject itself strikes chords which resonate in the soul of what we call this nation, and this cause. dKos itself is part of that resonance. Reading the diaries and comments here over the past couple of years, I can find so much that I would want to say being said. I can find the shock of recognition that others are saying what I want said.
Tonight, I feel that thrumming from those to whom Spike Lee has taken the time to give a camera. From the guy who told Dick Cheney what Cheney told a Senator to the New Orleans band playing on the streets of New York, gathering themselves back together after being thrown to the far corners of the nation, voices are rising up -- and they are our voices.
Since the Reagan Revolution when an exhuberant and amoral minority suddenly found themselves in power, our voices have been muted and refuted and pushed out of the media. By August, 2005, the nation finds its media calling the citizens of a major American city "refugees" as they are put on planes and buses and taken away to be dumped, like getting rid of a kitten we don't want. Act III of Spike's documentary chronicles the voices of these people as they try to let the rest of us know we, too, can be pushed out of the spotlight. Over a million citizens have been treated that way -- what makes us think the rest of us have any power to stop having our experience plowed under by the next turn of the news cycle?
The voices from Katrina linger, as much as those in power want to extinguish them. Leaders and politicians will come and go with thunderous speeches and images slickly produced to punch our buttons. We need to turn away from this "shock and awe" spectacle, to attend to the voices from our fellow citizens. After all the spin and hype is washed away, news cycles surging like the tides, we must abide, together, as a nation. We must be the People because no one else can be. If we find a way to abide together, we will be as secure as any people can be in the face of uncertainty and disaster. For our children and for ourselves, that is all any of us can ask.
In this Act, Spike Lee shows how the raw truth of those pushed out of the spotlight is replaced by photo-ops by politicians. We see the gloss of the media -- "Morning In America" redux -- being sealed by false indignity of pundits and local newscasts overreporting crime rates "soaring" because (the conceit is) all these "refugees" have invaded.
Such disasters can happen again, and probably will. People will need to be moved out of one area and live in others. The Government must be there to help just as fast and as determined as the tsunami relief effort was. Our taxes must go to true national security, starting with at least three ways to evaluate every last citizen from every major city within 24 hours, to properly equipping and training emergency response people in every community and full staffing of medical and relocation assistants.
Katrina showed us the kind of challenge we will have to face again, and the voices that linger tell us how much we still have to do to truly finish what started with a hurricane. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on adventures overseas which make us less secure, less respected and less wise about the realities of people in other nations. Meanwhile, we have allowed a whole city of people to be ignored, muffled and made to beg for the basics of life -- all while pundits and politicians take offense at their honesty as these fellow citizens vent even a small amount of their frustration and anger.
We may want things like this to go away, and we may be uncomfortable having to debate the realities of what we really have to do to be secure in our national life. We may want people we help to keep their mouths shut and we may want to make comments about the "looters" and "criminals" to salve our sense of failure. But we cannot allow ourselves that indulgence any more. Katrina's reality and the reality of its aftermath shows us issues we have to face. We have to face them ourselves, at every level of our communal life. We have to face them together through our Government and through our hunger for understanding.
The people Spike Lee allows his camera to capture are us on another day. Terrorists could strike anywhere: nature will strike everywhere eventually. Life is not secure, and never will be. Those who tell us to keep a civil tongue and believe our leaders or military or corporations or institutions can "keep us safe" are lying. No matter how high the levee; no matter how big the gun; no matter how great things can look on television -- ultimately there are situations we have to face together, each one alone. There are times we have to listen to each other and allow each other to speak in a way that may make us or them, or both, feel uncomfortable. That's the way real conversations move us all to become the People instead of just a herd of consumers.
When those who have needs must demand they be satisfied, we must have the moral courage to keep looking at the truth of their situation and let them guide us. Without this basic comity among citizens, nothing any politician or leader can do will make us safer.
The voices of the pundits and politicians in power only matter when they resonate with the truth of our experience. Otherwise, their voices are being used to turn us away, to hush us up and to avoid having to listen to any of us. We need the leveling of real conversation; the plain power of the voices like Spike Lee found and filmed and allowed the rest of us to hear. He is showing us a way back to the way we all need to speak to engage the truth and get past the curse of the sound bite and news cycle. His work makes me want to hear more. It makes me want to speak out, but in kind with those to whom I need to listen. It makes me want conversation with other people instead of spin-washed rhetoric through the tube.
Thank you, Spike. You knew I needed to listen and you brought me voices I need to hear. I only hope I can be worthy of that kind of conversation. It made me want to come here, to dKos, because this is one of the places where such conversation has been encouraged and I have listened to it flow by, day after day. May we all speak out more often, and listen more intently. May our Netroots candidates bring such conversation to the halls of Congress again. God willing and the river don't rise, may such conversation come to the halls of the White House and the Courts again. It's the only way we will find our way forward again -- citizen by citizen and day by day.
Voice by voice.