It is written to you not as Kossacks, not as Democrats.
It is written to you as Americans.
I have been monitoring and writing up the events on New International Times for five days now based on the excellent coverage of New Orleans by its own station WWL TV.
From the first day that I saw what was happening as the floods began I wrote of my disgust that the country that taught me risk and disaster management was being so inept. I was witnessing a shambles from a country that I had looked up to all my life. The failure is immense, so immense it is not a week in the making, it is not five years in the making. It is a whole generation in the making.
This morning on ABC News I am seeing that the situation is getting even more perilous.
I am seeing scenes that disgust me.
WHY, AN UTTERLY PERPLEXED AND REALLY ANGRY WHY, ARE THOSE IN OFFICIAL SHELTERS STILL CRYING OUT FOR FOOD AND WATER? THE SCENES FROM THE CONVENTION CENTRE YESTERDAY SHOWN BY ABC, WHICH DID NOT IMPROVE OVERNIGHT, WOULD SHAME ANY SOCIETY IN ANY PART OF THE WORLD.
I have not commented on DKos. I have seen your own anger and distress. There was nothing that I could add or needed to add to your comments. I simply shared reactions with the small group of friends on our corner forum of DKos that New International Times was intended to be.
I have reported on the condolences from European countries, but I have also reported on the growing disbelief of our newspapers and their questioning of your country and its policies.
I have reprinted comments from your own newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Tribune Review:
Villains lurk in 'me-first' pools of blame
By The Associated Press
Friday, September 2, 2005
WASHINGTON -- At every turn, political leaders failed Katrina's victims. They didn't strengthen the levees. They ceded the streets to marauding looters. They left dead bodies to rot or bloat. Thousands suffered or died for lack of water, food and hope. Who's at fault?
There's plenty of blame to go around -- the White House, Congress, federal agencies, local governments, police and even residents of the Gulf Coast who refused orders to evacuate. But all the finger-pointing misses the point: Politicians and the people they lead too often ignore danger signs until a crisis hits.
It wasn't a secret that levees built to keep New Orleans from flooding could not withstand a major hurricane, but government leaders never found the money to fully shore up the network of earthen, steel and concrete barriers. ...
..."The truth will speak for itself," Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said of potential lapses by government. Later, her office blamed the White House for budget cuts.
If it's not the Republicans' fault, perhaps some in Washington would like to blame New Orleans itself. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., questioned whether a city that lies below sea level should be rebuilt. "That doesn't make sense to me," he said.
But for anybody living -- or dying -- in the devastated region, there are far too many villains to name.
"We're out here like pure animals. We don't have help," the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center.
Robin Lovin, ethics professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said it's too convenient to blame one branch of government when they are all, at some level, failing people. From Watergate to Clinton's impeachment, governmental institutions have disappointed the public.
"Bush, Congress, the mayor -- each of them are symptoms of a bigger problem, that we don't have accountability for disasters or challenges of this scale," Lovin said. "That's all the public wants in trying times -- accountability."
React how you may to that quote, my only quarrel with it is that it talks simply of disaster management. The problem goes way beyond that single issue.
My comments will not please those Kossacks who want me to speak into the echo chamber of the Progressive left and simply talk about the divided beliefs of a society when the real issue is that society itself.
What I am seeing from the country that has taught me so much all my working life is a society that is failing, a great people who have a deep malaise. There is something that is wrong and it is there in the USA and needs to be countered by your society as whole.
If saying "the USA" gives offence, and not assigning blame to the current administration seems neglectful of Bush's contribution to what is happening, forgive me but this is how it will be seen across the world. The USA needs to take stock of itself as a nation - from its aging NASA flights, its broken social systems, its lack of regulatory control all the way through to its perception of its role in the world and how it performs it.
It pains me to write this. I have not reacted this way since I started writing on American blogs, nor does it give me any satisfaction, as one who has been a close associate and admirer of your country throughout his life.
As one writer, Cascadia Progressive, powerfully put it in his post on New International Times:
I am ashamed.
We must turn this around. Together, we have to see each other as neighbors with a common fate. We have to think wisely about our future, and elect leaders capable of respecting that wisdom and implementing real policy to protect us all. We can rebuild what was lost, not just this week, but over these many decades. If we don't, we leave the rot in our country for any convenient storm, natural or political or cultural, to turn us against each other, drowning us all in our own complacency and fear.
My hope is that the Democrats will not politicise this issue but will show real leadership, show their real claim to be fit to govern. My hope is that they will do this by addressing this not from the ideological divide but by addressing a more fundamental issue about the nature and reality of the society in which they live in a manner that can engage every member of that society.
Meanwhile, your friends can only despair
AMERICA WAKE UP! YOU SHAME ALL THOSE THAT ARE YOUR FRIENDS.