The Binary Circumstance

I have refrained from commenting on Bush’s “a car in every garage and a chicken in every oven” speech the other night where he discussed his plans for rebuilding New Orleans. Mostly because I’ve been busy finishing up renovating my bathroom, a project which has taken the past couple of months, but also because Bush is doing exactly what I said he would do–using the Katrina disaster to give government more control over the lives of all Americans.

But this just takes the cake.

WASHINGTON - Appealing to God for help with “the difficult work that lies ahead,”
President Bush on Saturday painted a picture of a hopeful and vibrant future for the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast and the people there who lost family, jobs, communities and everything they own in the storm.

“In the life of our nation, we have seen that wondrous things are possible when we act with God’s grace,” Bush said in his weekly radio address. “From the rubble of destroyed homes we can see the beginnings of vibrant new neighborhoods. From the despair of lives torn asunder we can see the hope of rebirth. And from the depth of darkness we can see a bright dawn emerging over the Gulf Coast and the great city of New Orleans.”

With Thursday night’s speech from the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter and while marking Friday’s national day of prayer for Hurricane Katrina’s victims, the president has begun turning more frequently to religious language as he seeks to comfort suffering evacuees and guide the nation forward.

Why appeal to God for help when God, who controls all things, just unleashed his fury upon the people of New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama?

As always, there’s a parallel between this misplaced religous faith and misdirected faith in the government. Now that Bush is using government to rebuild the disaster stricken area, people forget that it was decades of government mistakes that created the disaster or compounded what nature created in the first place.

Just as God is being called upon to fix a problem that any truly religious person is compelled to believe He created in the first place, government is being called upon to fix problems that it created in the first place.

Pop quiz: What’s wrong with this picture?

If you want to see a first-person account of what it was like to be stuck in New Orleans after Katrina, watch this video from WAFB9 in Baton Rouge, LA. [You’ll need to click on the link and you also probably need broadband to watch it.]

Charmaine Neville gives an emotional, yet thoughtful account of how it all looked to those who had nowhere to go, nothing to eat or drink, and who were raped while “rescue” workers flew overhead for days without ever stopping to help.

A post on MetaFilter quotes The Daily Mail [Sept. 15, 2005], and suggests that the story “may not hit the U.S. press for some time”:

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she ‘prayed for God to have mercy on her soul’ after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William ‘Forest’ McQueen, said: “Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die.”

In fact, the same story was reported by GulfNews.com on September 12.

Baton Rouge: Devastated doctors have revealed that they performed ‘mercy killings’ on patients rather than watching them die in agony in the chaotic aftermath Hurricane Katrina brought to Louisiana.

A New Orleans doctor, who was forced to flee her hospital last week to escape armed looters, told British newspaper The Daily Mail, that patients were divided into three categories. Those who were fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent treatment, and those who were dying.

The harrowed doctor told how she “prayed for God to have mercy on her soul” after she euthanised suffering patients.

“This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days,” she said.

Something’s up.

George W. Bush took full responsibility for the federal government’s failure to respond promptly and effectively to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Why do I have the feeling that after he knows “what went right and what went wrong,” he will propose more government spending on new programs and departments that further tighten the government’s grip on the citizens of this country?