Shame and Blame

Now that the cavalry has arrived, a dollar short and more than a few days late, I wonder who there is left to save? I wonder if the number of the living diminishes every hour, until the dead become the silent majority? Will the dead remain silent,refusing to be counted like the dead civilians in Iraq, allowing us to go on with our shallow lives? Will we soon be able to eat dinner in our air conditioned dining room without feeling shame?

These floating corpses are speaking to us loudly now, we are tossing and turning on our Certa Sleep mattress, the images of poverty and desperation in our own backyard haunting our comfortable holiday weekend, making the potato salad taste a little sour, and the hotdog shrink in it's bun. I have often trashed CNN, I thought that they were negligent during the run-up to war, and silent on many issues that need our attention. But the coverage and the outrage of these witnesses to our national shame may have spurred the rusty gears of our comfortable bureaucracy and actually saved some lives, although the habit of those powerful people to ignore or silence criticism is ingrained as deeply as our habit to ingnore the third world conditions of our fellow Americans. I never thought I would say this about CNN, but hey, here it is.

Well done.

When Congress comes back to work after the long paid holiday, I'm sure that blame will be placed on someone, there is plenty to go around, and then we will feel much better. Once blame is solidly placed on someone responsible, we will be able to sleep at night.

Our shame as a nation must compel us not only to prepare ourselves for the next emergency, but alleviate the conditions that allow a group of our fellow Americans to exist in a state of uncertainty, wondering if they might be left without means, without a way out of the next disaster, whether it is natural, or man-made.Otherwise, no matter how expensive and comfortable our beds are, we will be counting bodies instead of sheep.

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