Administrations fears images

[mburbank]

Friends and family members will almost certainly have a wide array of desires. Some of them might even be really angry with a federal government that abandoned them long before the Hurricane struck. If my Grandmother had drowned in a poorly funded nursing home three days after the hurricane stopped, I'd want the whole world to experience as much of my horror as possible, so that maybe, maybe we might wake up as a society and try to take care of our most vulnerable citizens instead of slowly channeling the nations wealth to it's richest %1.

Others might well feel differently.

The function of a free press ought to be to make an attempt to provide people with an unvarnished look at the truth. This is of course, impossible, and all too often no attempt is made. For those who do not want to look (and I don't blame anyone for feeling this way, I myself don't want to) the nations free press is ready every with several heartlifting photos of rescued pets and people being hugged by the President. If it were my dog, cat or child, I would personally feel violated. I'm being flip about the pets. I'm not being flip about the child. In bioth cases I would nto dispute the right of a free press to photograph and display the incident.

The dead in the street are members of the American family, and many of them are dead because we as a people failed them. We left them too poor to run, we elected people at all levels of government who are incompetent, greedy and arrogant, we did not protest loudly enough when cronyism replaced competence in their appointments and we let fear make us complacent. None of these things created Katrina. All of these things left the citizens as vulnerable as a soldier in Iraq without body armor. We are all responsible. It think it does the dead a disservice to look away.