Point of View

People have been saying that the government's response to Hurricane Katrina has been a huge embarrassment, which of course is true, but one writer went further: It wasn't just that the woebegone official reaction to the disaster had been an embarrassment, but that the disaster had brought into relief the day-in, day-out embarrassment that attends a society so divided by haves and have-nots.

On the one hand, you have a government continually embracing the well-heeled, whether they be defense contractors or garden variety millionaires, tending to their safety net, while, on the other, an increasing proportion of the populace is woefully underserved when it comes to such things as a decent education, health care, and the right to redress that the well-heeled and the moderately well-heeled have accepted as the path toward the good life.

All here were supposed to be entitled to the pursuit of happiness, and yet the gates leading toward that path have been creaking shut. There was a time when people like W.E.B. DuBois, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Richard J. Barnet, among others, spoke to the nation's conscience, and people listened.

* * *

"The good and just society is . . . a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism" (Martin Luther King Jr., "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community," Beacon Press, 1967).

"Perhaps in the struggle for democratic alternatives to corporate domination, the country will find, not simply answers to various problems, but its humanity, its generosity, its purpose" (Michael Harrington, "Decade of Decision - The Crisis of the American System," Simon and Schuster, 1980).

"The welfare of the mass of people should be the main object of government" (W.E.B. DuBois, "Speeches and Addresses 1920-1963, Pathfinder, 1970).

"Democratic control has been effectively set aside. This, with no exaggeration, is the present situation as regards the military in the United States. . . . From the modern-day power of the military over its own financial resources and the use to which they are put has come, in substantial measure, what the Founding Fathers most feared." (John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Good Society," Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996.)

"The power that can make us secure is not the power to bend other nations to our will, but the power to remake an America that is once again committed to the values for which the nation was founded - justice, opportunity, and the liberation of the human spirit." (Richard J. Barnet, "Real Security," Simon and Schuster, 1981.)

* * *

With the above in mind, I hope that the march set for Saturday in Washington, D.C., will constitute the flood that breaches the levee this administration has built around itself.

Jack Graves