southchild

This piece contrasts with my earlier post by Krauthammer and is something completely unexpected: a reasonable, non-partisan article on the Katrina fallout entitled, Scapegoats Can Wait, by Dick Meyer from CBS News of all places! Meyer writes,

Instead, with New Orleans still soggy and displaced thousands in agony, Washington is moving on — to hearings, post-mortems and probably commissions. If that stuff worked, wouldn’t, by definition, the response to Katrina have been more successful?

Contrary to what our politicians tend to teach us, outrage does not equal empathy. Nor is it the same as helpful action.
…
Regular Americans — as opposed to the political class — are responding to this crisis with generosity, contributions, time and true empathy. They aren’t inspired to that by finger pointers and sultans of snarky sound bites. The argument that endless condemnations by politicians are moving the bureaucracy to get things done simply doesn’t wash. Americans are moved not by rhetoric but by reality. They see the pictures on television.
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I do not mean to argue here that the response to Katrina was adequate or competent. It seems clear it wasn’t and the victims have every right in the world to be irate, as do those who have witnessed the devastation up close.

But the fact remains that this was a cataclysmic, epic natural disaster and great suffering was unavoidable. The time to figure out what went wrong and perhaps assign blame is not now. It will come soon enough and then it won’t end. Those who are pushing agendas of accusation now are mostly doing so from self-interest or sanctimony.

America has developed a bad habit of insisting that when bad things happen to people, someone must pay, someone must be to blame. It’s the spirit of litigation and too many of our politicians, like ambulance chasers, are preying on it. It’s embarrassing.

Meyer points out that both sides are guilty of premature finger-pointing; however, he passes on exposing some of the shrillest voices — his fellow reporters of the MSM. Even though this article is under the CBS News section, “Against the Grain,” considering the source, it is a “rather” well-balanced article, which makes it news in its own right.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 6:10 pm and is filed under General, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.