The Politics of Disaster

When I wrote It’s All Politics the purpose was to help people decipher politics in their daily lives as a means of self-defense. At the time, I didn’t have death and destruction in mind. But that’s exactly what we’re witnessing now -– the role that pernicious politics plays in creating horrific disasters. Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath have demonstrated that business-as-usual politics in government is extremely dangerous. The accepted practice of giving important jobs to people who assisted an election or who happen to be in the right place at the right time without regard for the match of task to expertise is at the heart of the unspeakable suffering of Katrina. Surely there is another way of saying “Thank-you”-- one that doesn’t endanger lives.

Then there is the issue of turf. When military personnel are ready to save lives but there are no trains or trucks to take them to their destinations, something is very wrong. During and after Katrina, the right hand of the U.S. government did not know what the left hand was doing, or –- worse -- one hand was purposely keeping the other uninformed. In the development and implementation of a disaster plan, issues of power and turf should become irrelevant. When lives are at stake, leaders need to have the political courage to put their career aspirations on hold.

If the horrific results of these two types of political machination aren’t enough for us to demand serious introspection by our leaders, then their attempts to manipulate our thinking should remove all hesitation. The hurricane and its immediate aftermath were not, as we’ve been told, similar to the first half of a football game. A win is not in store. People died during the “first half.” Then there was the first responder set-up. Emphasizing the term “first responders” in dialogues about this disaster serves to distance the federal government from responsibility. The implication: Those “first responders” should have had things under control. If we’re unlucky, we’ll be seeing other political games like poisoning of wells -– drop-by-drop devastation of people’s reputations, and giving them the rope to hang themselves where the politically naïve are encouraged to say too much and in so doing hoist themselves on their own petards.

As a country, we need to develop a political compass to tell us at what point political games must cease. We need to ask ourselves: When must such political habits as favor-granting, blaming the weakest link, power-grabbing, and gratuitous phraseology be abandoned to deal with the pressing concerns of people at risk?