That headline may not be long enough.
Anyway, I was going to lead with snark—I snapped a coupla’ pics yesterday that showed precisely nothing happening, weather-wise—but since the air pressure has dropped so much I can feel the blood pulsing in my face, my snark has dissipated right out the window.
The bite, however, the bite remains, so of course I’ll chew on Mitt Romney’s ass for suggesting that the federal government get out of the emergency management business:
First Romney says: “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better. [emph added] Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep?”
“Including disaster relief, though?” debate moderator John King asked Romney.
His response:
We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.
Makes perfect sense to worry about the well-being of those in the future, because using the federal government to keep people safe now certainly is craaaazy.
Two further thoughts: One, such sentiments indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of business, which is to make money. How will business make money from people who have none? Who is going to hire these private actors to clear trees and debris and search for survivors and bodies and repair roads and bridges and homes? If the feds don’t step in to pay these folks, who is going to do it?
Which leads to the second thought. Romney and his ilk may want to send this responsibility back to the states, but how many states can afford to take on this responsibility?
(And a third, stray, thought: weather tends to stray across state boundaries, so some kind of supra-state entity—like, say, FEMA—to coordinate responses might just make sense.)
If a President Romney (may these two words never be joined) were to get his way, it probably wouldn’t affect me all that much. I live in a wealthy city in a reasonably wealthy state, so if any place could take care its own, it would be New York.
But Louisiana? Misssissippi? Alabama? Screwed.
That ain’t right. No, I like neither the weather nor the politics of these places, but they are a part of the United States and the people who live in those states deserve both security and dignity. And if their states can’t or won’t provide it for them—if those same people vote for politicians who don’t care about their security and dignity—well, then, goddammit, the rest of us, via the federal government, should.
Let me be as explicit as possible: Not only do I not mind that my tax dollars would go to states and localities which may want to have nothing to do with my kind, I think my tax dollars should go to those places, if that’s where the need is.
And no, I don’t expect them to be particularly grateful, if only because citizens of this nation should expect that their fellow citizens will take care of them.
Because that’s what it means to be a citizen: To take care of one another, to take care of where and how we all live with one another.
AbsurdBeats 