Insofar as one can find a silver lining around a cloud as dark as the Katrina catastrophe, such a lining exists for us now. It's the same one we found in 1930 and further defined in 1932, and it's very simple: "We care." This is our frame and this is our contrast. It is, in fact, our very
raison d'être.
For conservatives, human suffering is an abstraction. A variable in a long-form equation they've never really solved anyway, though they're sure that X must equal "upper class tax cuts." They just don't get how rudely this abstraction manifests itself as misery and hopelessness in other people's lives, all because those people made the mistake of being born in the wrong family.
In short, they just don't get it.
(More below the fold.)
From our perspective, the incompetence/indifference of the administration toward the suffering along the Gulf Coast violates our most basic understanding of the purpose of government: to pool our common resources to insure no one suffers needlessly due to circumstances beyond his control. Suffering isn't a variable in an equation; it
is the equation, and until it is solved, all else is moot.
Conservatives accuse us of playing politics with suffering. They don't understand that our most core beliefs require us to reject their excuses and fingerpointing with furious anger -- THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR LETTING AMERICANS SUFFER AND DIE LIKE THIS. NONE.
This is who we are and what we believe in: that we are all in this together. That in time of need, we must all pull together and leave no stone unturned to help each other through. That elected government is the instrument of our common will and common bond, the conduit through which we can pool our resources and energies to insure that no American be left needlessly stranded to wither and die ever again. Ever.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 1776
In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up -- or else all go down -- as one people.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 2nd Inaugural, 1937