The Greatest Threat

The greatest threat to our country lies not in the sands of Iraq and its gathering insurgency or in the foothills of Tora Bora, but in our nation’s capital. The world has become a far more dangerous place for its inhabitants because of policies advanced by the Bush administration that on their face purport to offer safety and security for the nation, but, in truth, offer something quite different. That which we are witnessing is nothing short of a political and societal revolution that will leave us less secure, less safe and less prosperous than any point recent history. This is an administration that views the government as a personal playground to reward party loyalty at the expense of its obligation to protect and defend the constitution and its broader constituency. It gives refuge to and encourages an ideology that blatantly seeks to re-write the basic principals that have allowed this democracy to survive and prosper for more than 230 years. I am a life long Democrat, but, like most of the country, am neither liberal nor conservative in my views. I want to be safe, secure and prosperous and share a very real concern that the hole we have dug for ourselves will be difficult to overcome and that the damage inflicted upon us by those sworn to protect and defend us, while hopefully not irreparable, may be nearly so.

I’ve only walked the earth for a bit more than fifty years and thus can’t say with any certainty that we as a nation have seen a worse time in the nation’s life. Certainly the threats posed by both world wars represented unprecedented threats to our nation’s survival yet in both instances those threats were imposed by forces beyond our borders and, in many ways, galvanized a response which permitted the country to emerge stronger and positioned in the new global paradigm as the world’s first and now only surviving super power. Unlike that which has come before, what we face now is of our own doing and, more to the point, the doing of the Bush administration and all those who support it. Never in my lifetime have I seen a government as arrogant, so incompetent, so deceitful, so insensitive and so out of touch with the hopes and aspirations of its constituents as that which controls our lives as we go to bed this night.

We are, as well, witnessing a cultural shift by that leads creatures like Bill Bennett to believe he has license to very publicly state that the best way to reduce the crime levels in this country is to abort all black babies. As with so much about this cultural shift and its proponents, it is not so much an absolutist view of the world as it is a view that picks and chooses its way through its social agenda to produce an outcome that simply serves their end. It is not that abortion is wrong in all its forms, but that when applied in the fashion advocated by Mr. Bennett, it can actually serve a social end. I suspect that Mr. Bennett, an ardent anti-abortion activist is not the only one of his ilk to share this view concerning the selective use of abortion to further a political end. The view, in fact, seems to have been embraced in less strident terms by many Republicans in Congress who view the Diaspora created by Katrina as a way to re-create the character of New Orleans by controlling the numbers of black families returning to the City and, in turn, redistricting the City to limit the effect that a black vote would have both locally and state-wide. While it’s certainly not the same as killing black babies, the effect, in many ways, is unfortunately the same.

Ultimately, I suspect that Mr. Bennett’s perverse views will not prevail and that the de-minoritization (admittedly not a word) of New Orleans will be resisted and fail. The point, however, is that the culture created by and surrounding Mr. Bush invites, encourages and ultimately protects this type of philosophy and therein lies the danger.