Drowning New Orleans in the Bathtub

Grover Norquist, the Guru of our current Republican administration, has famously said "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." This week he may have partially succeeded in his goal.

While the government has not yet drowned, he and his devotees successfully reduced the size of government enough that the City and People of New Orleans were effectively left to drown in their Katrina created bathtub.

The current administration and the conservative movement makes no secret of the fact that they think government is bad. After all, they don't need it. They have everything they need - money, connections, 10,000 square foot first homes, and more and more tax breaks. In fact, while thousands of Gulf Coast residents scramble to rebuild their lives, Congress is going to vote on another tax break for the wealthy this Tuesday. The Bush administration sees it as a "priority" to abolish the Estate tax this week. In the face of the inequities that we have seen over the past week, this is nothing less than obscene.

The basic services of government - levee maintenance, engineering projects, schools, local government services, and health care - have been left to wither on the vine while those with enough money buy their way out cloak their privilege in terms like "consumer choice".

At some point this logic breaks down, and Katrina was our breaking point. Most Americans are decent people, and many felt a deep sense of shame as they saw the tragedy of New Orleans unfold last week. A tragedy that was at least partially due to a society that has bought the ideology of small government for years.

It's time to rethink our priorities. Nobody wants an excessive pork barrel government that invades our bedrooms and our privacy. But I think most Americans do want a government that can provide excellent education to everyone, health insurance to all families so that nobody has to lose their home over a child's illness, and an infrastructure sufficient to keep us reasonably safe. We have lived so long with the ideology of "government is bad" that we have forgotten that the government can do things well - if it has adequate funding.

Grover Norquist would have us believe that we are all individuals seeking our own libertarian paradise behind locked gates. The fact is that we are a society, we are all connected, and the privileged turn their backs on the greater good at the expense of the well being of rich and poor alike. A society that has private affluence and public poverty is a primitive society, and a place where I feel ashamed to live. Let's rebuild a great society. We need the rich to come out from behind their tax shelters and their gated communities to join the rest of us. Let's move beyond the shame. Let's make American great again. We can start in New Orleans.