I am ashamed

Dear President Bush,

I am ashamed of your behavior in response to Hurricane Katrina, and I am ashamed for our country. It has taken you five days to take seriously the suffering and dehumanization of our most vulnerable, oldest, and poorest citizens. Members of your administration have belittled the powerless, as when FEMA Director Brown characterized the poor people left behind in New Orleans by an inadequate evacuation plan as those "who chose not to evacuate, who chose not to leave the city." While people were dying on the streets of New Orleans because they were without food, water, or shelter, you were still vacationing and members of your administration were shopping for expensive shoes in Manhattan and going to Broadway plays. The National Guard that could have been helping out is instead in Iraq. Every year you have been in office you have cut the funding that might have kept New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from being so harmed -- because the money went to the war in Iraq. FEMA has been re-shaped so that it is no longer capable of adequate or informed response.

I, like many others not in governmental-decision-making positions, have sent money to the Red Cross, not because you asked, but because it is the right thing to do. It would also be the right thing for you to understand that the behavior of you and your administration shows the world how little our government cares for the most vulnerable and how poorly we have prepared in this country for attacks or disasters of any kind.

You should be ashamed. As a citizen of a country that is treating its own in this way, I am.

Sincerely, me

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Others have said all this better than I can. So my writing here is some sort of self-indulgent non-release of anger -- although I did send the above letter to its named recipient. I don't feel any better.