[Mb-civic] MUST READ --> Katrina's truths - James Carroll - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Katrina's truths

By James Carroll  |  September 5, 2005

LABOR DAY is the true American New Year's, the day of fresh beginnings 
-- and this year it's just in time. The broader culture takes its cue 
from school children, who leave the house this week believing in 
possibility itself. We, their parents and grandparents, need the 
reminder that change for the better is the business of human life. 
Change for the worse, alas, has been the rule of the season past, which 
is why the time is ripe for something new.

Hurricane Katrina was more than a natural disaster. It was a political 
epiphany, laying bare difficult truths from which, mainly, the United 
States has been in flight. Most obviously, the flooding of the cities 
and towns along the Gulf Coast has pulled a curtain back on a huge 
population of desperately impoverished people. The ''other" America, as 
Michael Harrington called it a generation ago, has shown itself as 
hardly ever before. The wealthiest nation on earth has its hidden legion 
of have-nots, and all at once the rest of us saw them. The scandal of 
rank poverty was exposed, and if beholding it was like seeing something 
indecent, that's because such poverty in this nation is exactly that -- 
indecent.

At the same time, the abstraction of ''poverty" has been made concrete. 
Face after anguished face appeared on television to tell us, This is 
what it is like to live with absolutely no margin of safety or comfort. 
There was dignity in those faces, at times nobility. Mostly, though, 
there was pain. Diabetics without insulin, babies without diapers, 
evacuees with no mode of transport, urban hospital workers entirely 
without backup. America has its river of refugees now, tens of thousands 
of people who, herded into sports palaces-turned-charnel-houses, are 
alike in having nothing to return to.

The spectacle of failure, how for days the government was powerless to 
help such people, only put on display how government was already failing 
them and everyone else. Here was Katrina's second main epiphany -- what 
it means that the United States, after a generation of tax-cutting and 
downsizing, has eviscerated the public sector's capacity for supporting 
the common good. The neglect of civic infrastructure, the destruction of 
social services, the abandonment of the safety net, the myth of 
''privatization," the perverse idea, dating to the Reagan era, that 
government is the enemy: It all adds up to what we saw last week -- 
government not as the enemy, but as the incompetent, impotent bystander. 
The bystander-in-chief, of course, is George W. Bush, whose whining 
self-obsession perfectly embodies what America has done to itself.

One cannot see the devastated cities or that river of refugees or those 
harried National Guard soldiers without seeing something even more 
disturbing -- Katrina's third epiphany. This is what war looks like, and 
the harsh reality is that the United States has been the source of 
exactly such devastation elsewhere. Obliterated cities, populations 
pushed into refugee camps, young American soldiers overwhelmed by the 
impossibility of their mission -- this is Iraq today. Oil is part of the 
Gulf Coast story and part of Iraq's story, too. We are at war for oil, a 
war we cannot win. Four dollar gasoline. The truth is crashing over us, 
a tsunami of it.

---->  READ THE REST - it's well worth your time...Bill

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/05/katrinas_truths/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050905/ead017cf/attachment.htm