"Left to Starve, to Thirst, to Broil"

From a local paper, the Framingham Metrowest News:

Joe Bradley, a resident of Framingham: Truth shatters faith in government

Our aged, our children, our fellow citizens not fortunate enough to have evacuated the City of New Orleans prior to the storm along with the more fortunate, more upwardly mobile 80 percent of the city's residents, were left to starve, to thirst, to broil in the heat of New Orleans because they were the forgotten people.

If the Beverly Hills Hotel were overflowing with 20,000 wealthy people who had taken refuge from a natural disaster, I cannot believe that it would have taken three days for helicopters to start bringing in supplies of food and water. The response of our government would, I believe, have been immediate. I have finally come to realize what our country is all about. It is about class, wealth, and political power. The poor of New Orleans have no lobbyist on K Street representing their interests, so they were written off.

We are all criminally liable for those that died during those three days because of lack of supplies -- all of us who have ever voted, who have ever worked within the system, who have ever believed in our system. Yes, you and I.

I believed in our system, in our government, in our country until I was 53. Sort of a late bloomer, my belief in fantasy was finally overcome when I saw our brothers and sisters in New Orleans suffering and dying.

Faced with the truth, I want to believe in our system, in our government, in our country, but I can't.

Richard Reeves, columnist: The failure in New Orleans

The president himself, seeing the bloating bodies of his citizens abandoned by government in dark waters, immediately understood, so he said, that the problem was "bureaucracy." Sir, the problem was you and your ilk.

George W. Bush, a child of the anti-government, had heard and said for so long that government was the enemy, that government could not be trusted, he was unwilling or unable to use its power to save its citizens before it was too late. He is doing the same thing in Iraq, where he is unwilling to give young men and women wearing the government's uniforms on his orders the reinforcements and equipment they need to survive, much less prevail, in a war they cannot win.

The tragedies in New Orleans and Baghdad are both tragedies of stunted minds who do not believe in the capacity of the people of the nation organized as government. The stupidity of anti-government bias was dramatized a week after the waters came in biblical force. The pilots of two Navy helicopters were reprimanded for acting as if they were big brotherly government by rescuing more than a hundred people when their orders specified that their only mission was to deliver food and water to other military personnel.....

Government is about providing and enforcing law, about delivering order and security from the forces of hostile peoples and the powers of nature. Government is about offering fairness and justice and the right of appeal to the poorest and meekest of us. It owes us a living, which I would define as providing education, the blessings of public health, and rational management of land and water and the other natural resources of this rich place of ours.

Many of the dead people floating along the edges of the Gulf of Mexico right now are there because the people running the government hate government and, worse, do not understand the idea and obligations of government. We are a lesser people because of that -- and the whole world is watching.