Friday morning

Not really a rant this morning. More musing. A couple of things going on. SOF and I listened to the NPR this morning during our coffee run and several stories caught our attention. This one has a FEMA employee (current) saying that he and his team warned Brown and Chertoff with very strong language well before the storm hit. They showed up to work the next morning expecting to see the response--there was little. Chertoff is not coming off well in this entire disaster. I hope that Brown is not just the sacrificial lamb--he clearly was in over his head, but so are several people above him.

Second story was Juan Williams' exploration of race and class in this storm. Kanye West made headlines with his charge that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." I loved Laura Bush's response that the President "cares about everyone." Right. That is why he has governed with such compassion. John Barry, who wrote the book on the 1927 Mississippi flood says that while he doesn't like the administration, he doesn't think they failed New Orleans because of race. I think he is probably right. It isn't that he doesn't care about black people. He doesn't care about those who don't fit into his political matrix. I suspect if that storm had been headed to Houston, he would have paid a lot more attention.

Back to the first story, I have been mulling over Bootleg Blogger's post on the social safety net. I remember the Y2K craze and the dire predictions that we needed to stock up canned goods and water. Then came the Homeland Security fears and discussions on duct tape. We have always been a little lax on disaster planning. We have food in the house, but have not necessarily kept potable water on hand or stuff like that. In the back of my mind, I have always thought along these lines: If it hits my house, those things won't matter, and if it is catastrophic, it won't be enough. In between, I trusted my government to actually be able to manage things. I believed that while I might be uncomfortable for a while, someone out there was planning to make sure that we didn't starve or run out of water. I no longer feel that way. I feel much more vulnerable than I once did.

Thanks, President Bush. Thanks for preying on our fears for your own political advantage and then undercutting the very social network that we turn to when something actually happens.

One bit of good news from NPR this morning. During one of the reports, a historian remarked that Republican politicians were talking differently than they had before the storm. After making their entire political agenda out of attacking government as evil, and bashing programs that helped the poor and other social issues, they were slowly realizing that government might be important. Finally.