User:Kyle Andrew Brown/Archive2

At first stunned and in disbelief, Hurricane Katrina has left America with heartbreak and fury. The homeless toddler who remembers: "They pushed my mother into the water." The Louisiana Parish president who says: "Take whatever idiot they have at the top and give me a better idiot." The normal business of Washington at a standstill: that $1.5 billion a day tax break for the rich, the Supreme Court nominees, Social Security. Oh, and will there soon be a vacancy at FEMA as well? Always the complaint: the media never has positive news. So far, the 21st Century hasn't given the American people much to celebrate. And now the news the President will head the investigation of what went wrong, afterall as he says: "People want us here to play a blame game." World Series fever coming up? Mayor Ray Nagin is more concerned of the typhoid fever lurking in the waters of his city and the shock coming to the nation "when we start pulling bodies out of all these homes." Don Imus, it's left to you to give this sad American narrative a spin of your own.

At the end of yet another dreadfull week the nation is left to ponder: "Are we a nation at war? A week ago, we thought it was the War in Iraq. But there are no ration books, the returning dead at Dover Air Force Base are, at the direction of the President, hidden from camera view. Then Mother Nature came knocking along America's Gulf Coast. "Here I be!" she told us and noone could turn off J. T. Alpaugh's video images. And noone could turn off the politicians at every level of government. The shame, the horror, the disbelief of - oh, not of Hurricane Katrina - but of those charged with protecting the vulnerable. 21st century America - the land of cameras at every intersection, at every workplace, at every playground, at every mall - watching our every personal movement. Those same cameras recorded a Nation At War. And our leaders were helpless to turn them off.