Still Living on the Edge

The events on the Gulf Coast over the last few weeks have been traumatic for America.
Seeing wall-to-wall coverage of the carnage could not help but touch all but the most heartless among us.
And yet...
Amid all the chest-beating, finger-pointing, and general disarray surrounding the chaos generated by Hurricane Katrina one can make a number of observations about our country.

First the good news - Americans as a society are a caring, generous, and sympathetic people. Over the years we have demonstrated our willingness to provide assistance to the needy in very large doses.
America is also a very rich society that enables it to marshal resources unprecedent in human history. (The reasons WHY we are so rich will be ruminated about in another posting.)

Unfortunately that is almost all the good news.

America as a society is also myopic, reactive, and frequently in denial about the obvious.
In addition, our society is fragmented, stratified, and polarized.

And our government is mired in bureaucratic fiefdoms that stretch from the local mayors to the White House.

Although the aftermath of Katrina provides many lessons, it also brings to light some of the shortcomings of a constitution that was written in a different time to address different concerns from the ones that plague us today, and of laws that have been enacted to deal with short-term crises using broad and not-well-thought-out brush strokes. The law of unintended consequences seems to have been a codicil to the Stafford Act.

The question posed by the pundits on the talkshows and the morning interview circuit keeps focusing on "what went wrong" with a desire to find someone, anyone, to blame. Mike Brown served as a suitable initial scapegoat, and once we find a few more to fall on their swords public interest will die down and we will all return to our somnolence knowing that the incompetents responsible have been rooted out and life can continue as before. But no-one wants to seriously address the systemic issues that made the situation worse, and within hours of the hurricane striking the coast those issues impacted our collective response by allowing the nomenclatura at the various levels of power to wrangle over who would control what, rather than forcing collaboration to deal with the situation.

Numerous laws have been passed over the years to restrict the power of the federal government in dealing with emergencies - to purely humanitarian efforts. It is only at the request of local and state officials that the military can move in and participate in law and order exercises, unless the POTUS is prepared to declare an insurgency -something he would have done at his peril.

Will congress act to empower the federal government to respond more effectively to an event such as Katrina without local requests? Unlikely - very few in power at any level are eager to relinquish a scintilla of that power - no matter what the cost in lives and treasure.

It will be interesting to see how our nation responds to dealing with the systemic failures highlighted by this tragedy once the immediacy is gone and the aftermath is no longer daily fare in the media circus.