dangerous squalor
compassionless people live a skin deep life, where empty slogans (for example, "tax relief" or "defend marriage" or "reverse discrimination") are cultural scams to protect the arrogant from the dangerous squalor lurking like inconvenient details in our culture's brutal conquering march across history. the current world champ of compassionless cronyism is george w. bush, the least capable president of my lifetime, a man who parties and vacations while sending our national guard to die in iraq for a war he started just because he could. the conservative media cannot figure out how to criticize the shallow figurehead bush presidency they have helped create. far from being the most powerful position on the planet, george w. bush is a visionless shill from the petroleum industry. he rushes from one cynical photo-op to another, acting as if he cares when his actions clearly show otherwise (example - cutting benefits for veterans while waging war with reservists and the national guard; or how about letting policy hacks alter inconvenient scientific conclusions). the bush presidency is one long media sideshow trying to spin away the disastrous impact of our obsessive elitism. there's no nice way to say it: my country is run by people who lack concern for the impoverished and the unfortunate. the clearest current expression of this malaise is the arrogant, corporate and compassionless presidency of george w. bush.

what reputation do we deserve as a nation when we allow our public education system and our economy to knowingly (intentionally?) slough off a huge underclass of apparently discardable lives? the answer is simple, as long as there is no natural disaster or emergency, "we" (who have the personal and cultural resources to plan and buy a path out of harm's way) act like nothing is wrong, like it's perfectly natural for aggressive beggars to roam our streets, for fifty million residents to live without health insurance, or millions of children to go to bed hungry.

but when a disaster like the flooding of new orleans hits, the impoverished untouchable class whom we have abandoned for generations is left stranded on rooftops and overpasses to die of neglect in full view of the world's media. this conspicuous failure is our report card as the richest nation in the world. apparently we're not smart enough to prepare for a predictable tragedy when a major city is built below sea level on the delta of a massive river as it empties into one of the world's great hurricane zones. we deserve to be slammed by history for the depth of our denial. the bungled response to the flooding in new orleans is a national disgrace.

how do we care for our most vulnerable citizens? apparently, we don't care at all, or if we do it's just enough to feel good about how generous we are. too bad it's not enough "care" to actually construct a safety net for the unwanted, but that seems to be our situation in a nutshell: we have allowed ourselves the inexcusable luxury of discardable citizens. oh we'll throw public tantrums in defense of the unborn, but meanwhile we punish the living with lives of misery, squalor and oppression. and now, watching those we have dispossessed as they expire on camera in the ultimate reality programming, we see in a mirror just how compassionate we are not. suddenly, those gaping holes in our safety net are coughing up corpses on prime time. our neighbors we find so convenient to ignore while we live in self-important affluence turn out to be directly in harm's way during emergenices. this is the danger of ignoring the squalor in our midst.
posted by Will Ross at 07:16