A much more reasoned liberal approach

A professor friend of mine from Mercyhurst College (shout out to my undergrad alma mater! Viva la Lakers!) sent me Michael Moore's well-crafted rant on George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina. My favorite line: "On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that."

Great rhetoric that soothes my soul, but I'm also conscious that this type of language doesn't win anyone over who isn't already converted to working against GWB's wacky-ass policies.

But this morning I came across a much more reasoned reason (teehee!) about why GWB and his cronies have failed our country miserably. I say reasoned because this hits at so many of our society's problems - all of which conservatism is miserably inadequate for. It's from Amy Sullivan, who is an editor at the Washington Monthly and writes often on faith and politics. Enjoy...

These are desperately poor people who've been deliberately left behind, in so many senses of the word. Left behind by society, shut up in housing projects and hideous poverty, and now truly left behind by local and federal officials who failed to come up with an evacuation plan for people too poor and isolated to leave on their own. Why didn't we send a caravan of buses into the city's poorest neighborhoods on Saturday or Sunday, when the dimensions of the disaster were already predictable? Sure, Houston's got electricity and running water, but tens of thousands of scared, angry people packed into an abandoned sports stadium? We couldn't come up with a better symbol of how little we care about the poor, how little we've thought about what to do with them, for them, if we tried.

We've heard the warning "this isn't about politics" over and over in the last few days. The hell it isn't. And I don't mean kicking Bush while he's down, just for the fun of it, although there are surely liberals eager to do that. For the rest of us, however, we're seeing the awful real world consequences of conservatism play out on our television screens. This is why we're liberals. We don't yell about poverty and racial disparities for kicks. An evacuation plan that consists of telling people to get out on their own is not an evacuation plan.

A Washington Post reporter shares this account of one family's ordeal leaving New Orleans this week that made me initially frustrated and then just profoundly sad. The father describes standing in his living room with his wife and five children as the floodwaters rose, trying to decide what to do. They have a car, but he says "it's a five-seater" and some of the family members would have had to sit on laps. Seems like a ridiculous reason to stay, no? But then he explains that they heard the highway police would not hesitate to arrest drivers who broke the law. So he stayed at home, choosing to take his chances with nature instead of taking his chances as a black man in the Southern criminal justice system.

How sad. Sad that it takes a killer hurricane to get us to even start talking about racism, poverty and class in this country again.