In the second-to-last Real Time with Bill Maher, the talking head from the American Enterprise Institute pointed out how disappointed he was that the Economist ran a cover which implied that the United States should be ashamed of itself for the Katrina disaster. He said the left wing loves to “Blame Us First”, but he doesn’t buy into that; he’s still proud to be an American.

You’re not ashamed? I think I might understand why he thinks that way. For example, if you’re walking by a cliff, and see some poor guy slip and almost fall of the cliff, and now he’s there hanging off the edge, you would be compelled to go help that person. So you run over to him, put your hand out, and he grabs your hand, and you try with all your might to pull him up. But you just can’t do it, and so eventually you lose your grip and he falls anyway.

One might ask the question, should you be ashamed of the way you acted?

You might feel regretful, you might feel sorry, but you definitely shouldn’t be ashamed of yourself. You did what you could to save him, but he couldn’t be saved. You still did the right thing, it just wasn’t good enough.

Except now imagine that instead of rushing out to grab this guy, you just pulled up a chair, sat down, scratched your chin, and said, “You know, you probably shouldn’t have been walking so close to the edge.”

And as that guy is screaming there for help, you just sit there, emotionless, and debate the should-have’s and could-have’s, instead of getting up saving him.

And he falls to his death.

That’s what the US Government did, and, more particularly, that’s what the right wing that supports it did. And it’s shameful. It’s very, very shameful.

It’s not that people died. It’s that people died and we sat back and told them, “You had it coming to you. Tough shit.”

Land of the Free. Home of the Brave.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 20th, 2005 at 11:13 am and is filed under Philosophy, Politics, US Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.