OK, YHB is still insensitive and all, but I have passed through the stage of vague interest into outrage. How could we fail to provide food, water, shelter and medicine to our own refugees?\n
My shock over this goes back to the thing I had talked about some time ago, my belief in Optimism as an American Virtue. Optimism is the wrong word for it, but it’s that can-do spirit that I identify as an important part of what it means to be America. Because I still believe in that, it simply had never occurred to me that when we invaded Iraq, we would do so with ill-equipped and ill-trained troops. Seriously, it never occurred to me. Yes, I know, armies are always ill-equipped and ill-trained, and I had heard the stories about the quartermasters scrounging for guns, ammunition and boots in WWII and especially WWI. I know that we have gone into war with an ill-equipped and ill-trained army before. But I was still surprised that we did it, and I will be surprised when we do it again (please the Lord, not for many years).\n
Similarly, when New Orleans was going to be hit by a hurricane, I knew people would die, and I knew there would be a lot of damage, but it didn’t occur to me that we would be unable to organize airlifts, that people would die of dehydration in the shelters<\/I> before we could get water in or them out. It just never occurred to me.\n
I mean, for one thing, our emergency preparedness people have presumably been preparing for emergencies over the last four years, right? Right? The whole idea of providing food, water, transportation, medical care and shelter for tens of thousands of people is not completely new to us. This is the sort of plan that Our Previous President and Our Last-but-one President had put off, because it was too expensive, and too pessimistic, and yadda yadda yadda, but when Everything Changed, that was one of the things that changed, right?\n
I know that the America I believe in never existed. I think that’s the point of America, to believe in the America we have been trying to make, you and me and James Madison and Abraham Lincoln and even Ronald Reagan, not the America we have. So it’s not a shock, or it shouldn’t be, to discover that America has failed itself again, any more than it’s shock to discover that America has exceeded itself again. But this kind of thing, this sort of work, that’s what we’re good at<\/I>. If we can’t take care of the people of New Orleans and rebuild, well, what are we here for?\n
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, YHB is still insensitive and all, but I have passed through the stage of vague interest into outrage. How could we fail to provide food, water, shelter and medicine to our own refugees? My shock over this goes back…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17509,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3097\/revisions\/17509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}