For the People

Shaker RM forwards two stories reporting the account of California paramedics Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, who were attending the EMS conference in New Orleans when Katrina hit. Here and here.

RM notes: “I was just reading the Guardian (because our national press seems to have been shut down again) and they had a link to this survivors report about the National Guard or FEMA commandeering buses they had arranged to get themselves out of NO. I'm inclined to think that these guys aren't just incompetent or unskilled in what they were hired to do. It almost has to be willful malevolence.”

I believe I would be hard-pressed to find any news accounts of government action that would summarily contradict that assertion. As story after story comes out about the multitude of failures which defined this debacle, and our president’s commentary amounts to “What didn’t go right?” as if he has been wholly insulated from the horrors unfolding before the nation’s eyes for more than a week now, it becomes apparent that the failures were beyond apathy or incompetence. And that’s because apathy, incompetence, inaction, unpreparedness, chaos, etc. exhibited by the government on such a grand scale is malevolent. Forget the conspiracy theories being floated about the levees being blown to save more valuable property or the government using this as a dress rehearsal for martial law—whether they’re true or not doesn’t even matter in deciding whether their behavior was wicked.

There are sins of commission and sins of omission—and even secular people like myself acknowledge the difference between the two, though we may call them by different names. Even I’ve heard the name Kitty Genovese, though she was murdered within ear- and eyeshot of more than 30 witnesses who didn’t help her, 10 years before I was born. This isn’t the first time I’ve had cause to note that our good Christian president doesn’t seem to have read the parable of the Good Samaritan, and I’m sure it won’t be the last, because conservatives, upon hearing the tale retold with government playing the title role, dismiss it as socialism, nanny-statism, communism, unfair unjust unnecessary!

They’ve no empathy or love for their fellow Americans who suffered such dire fates, and no hint of recognition that their favorite philosopher, a poor man who spent his time ministering to the indigent and the sick, would have been lost had he been of New Orleans rather than of Nazareth. Of course, his message was lost to them long ago.

Yes, this is a story of underfunded levees, and poor evacuation plans, and a cabinet-level department being folded into a larger organization, and the appointment of unqualified hacks, and all the rest. But it is primarily a story about a government—a government meant to be of the People, by the People, and for the People—that let its people down on an unprecedented scale, that let its people die for want of a glass of water.

Call it whatever you want—sin of omission, criminal negligence, hard-heartedness, racism, classism—it doesn’t matter. What these all have in common is antipathy toward the vulnerable and hurting, and that’s bigger, and oh so much worse, than mere incompetence.