Keeping One's Head out of the Clouds

The following is a preliminary draft of a column I have written on Katrina and the war. Constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated.

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It was already balmy that morning as I surveyed the damaged houses that stretched endlessly around me in every direction. "What are these people going to do?" I thought. Everything was coated with a tan dust, making it seem like I was surveying the destruction through some kind of gauze. Not long ago, this had been pretty nice place to live.

The vignette above is not a wartime description from the ground in Baghdad, but of an area not far from where my wife grew up in New Orleans, as observed six weeks after Katrina struck.

This Houstonian with strong ties to New Orleans is quite storm weary. We took in two family friends before Katrina hit New Orleans, only to see them head north to be with family after it became apparent they'd lose everything and be unable to return for weeks. While waiting for officials to declare New Orleans safe, we fled from Rita. All told, hurricanes have accounted for two weeks of our time this summer, and we haven't even been struck!

We just recently went to the site of America's worst natural disaster to help my wife's parents ready for sale the home they had lived in for nearly two decades and had planned to use in retirement. My wife grew up there and, like her family, had come to love the Big Easy. But for all practical purposes, New Orleans was no more for our friends, our family, and countless others after that terrible storm.

One of America's most legendary places is on life support and may never fully recover. The city where I proposed to my wife and where we got married is a scene of overwhelming devastation.

I risk gilding the lily with this personal account. After all, with the nonstop cable news coverage of hurricanes this summer, one would hardly know we were a nation at war. Indeed, one estimate of the cost of recovering from this storm, $200 billion, is about twice what we have spent fighting the war in Iraq!

And while we lost a few airplanes and buildings on September 11, 2001, Katrina, praised by a government official in Kuwait as a great terrorist, nearly succeeded in wiping a major American city off the map. Aside from that, Jesse Jackson and other civil rights activists have mourned the loss of the home to over a hundred thousand poor New Orleanians who will now have to "acculturate" to strange surroundings.

Surely, if Katrina relegated Iraq and Cindy Sheehan to the teletype at the bottom of the cable news screen, if she made al Qaeda sympathizers proud, and if she upset Jesse Jackson, the storm was a greater tragedy than 9/11.

If you agreed with that last sentence, you would be sorely mistaken.

First of all, the damage resulting from Hurricane Katrina, a natural event beyond man's control, is the only event of the two that can properly be called a "tragedy". The terrorist attacks in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York were deliberate acts by evil men. They were not tragedies. They were atrocities.

In fact, although I do not know anyone personally who died on September 11, 2001, I cannot bring myself to call it "9/11". The short term has such an Orwellian ability to cause us to forget what happened that day that even Michael Moore had to lengthen the title of his famous movie so its audience could form the mental associations he wanted. I almost never call the mass murders that took place on September 11, 2001 "9/11" and I absolutely never refer to them as a "tragedy".

But back to Michael Moore for a moment. What was the thrust of his movie? That George Bush invaded a peaceful country for the sake of oil, causing untold human suffering.

And speaking of George Bush, it is noteworthy that in certain leftist quarters, the severe devastation visited upon the poor and heavily black ninth ward in New Orleans was blamed on his negligence in reinforcing the levees in that area. In fact, some on the far left even claimed that the levee breaks were deliberately caused by the Bush administration. Bush was being blamed for mass murder after Katrina!

By this point, one wonders why a deliberate mass murder is merely called a "tragedy", a movie is made depicting kids flying kites in a nation that gassed its own citizens, and the President of the United States is being accused in every respect but the term being used, of genocide.

Why are we being urged to think of a terrorist attack as if it is on a par with a natural disaster and ignore the crimes of a dictator, while at the same time we are to blame the President for the deaths that occurred in a hurricane?

It is because the purpose of our government is to protect the individual rights of its citizens from being violated by enemies, foreign and domestic. Our government exists because human beings have free will, and can sometimes choose to violate our rights, including the right to our own lives.

Because the power of our government is rooted in the people, it is the people who must make the moral evaluation of a person, a group, or a nation as a threat to our lives before the government will act.

This is why those who oppose Bush are attempting to lay the blame for Katrina on him. They see Bush as opposed to the welfare state they clearly hope to expand in the wake of Katrina. While ousting Bush might seem their goal, having Bush in office and trying to hold onto power while appeasing liberal constituencies with "reparations" for his "racism" would do nicely for them.

And this is also why the atrocities of September 11, 2001, although distant in time and hazily recalled by many, are far more important than the storm that has pushed them out of the limelight. Here, we know that our lives are being threatened by foreign enemies and that our government is acting properly to protect them.

For all the hot air being blown around about hurricanes this year, and for all the upsetting images of suffering on our own soil, don't let the press sell you a bill of goods. While our nation must recover from a hurricane, we are still at war. We may or may not suffer a similar storm in the future, but evil men who want us dead are still out there looking for ways to kill us.

Your sensory overload, your mistaken priorities, and (some hope) your gullibility will only make it easier for the terrorists. No matter what, wartime is not the time to lose focus.

-- CAV