Adieu, 2005

I thought I'd revisit the reason I started blogging, Hurricane Rita. Rita was the disaster that wasn't, where Katrina was the all-clear that became a disaster. My girifriend was caught in the evacuation of Houston, forty-two hours under way between Deer Park, Texas and San Antonio. The trip normally takes four hours. It was in this evacuation that my distaste for the inadequacy of the American news media reached critical mass, the weapons of mass distraction we cause news angered me to the point where I had to do something. So I began to write. I still don't have a readership that I can point to, there are no comments left on my posts but I have the hope that somewhere out there, someone is reading this and that it might change a mind or two.

During the evacuation, meaningful information was impossible to find. The national news media vacillated between Rick Perry and George Bush high-fiving each other for the "smooth" evacuation (massive traffic jams, over a hundred deaths due to heat stroke, no services available and no relief trucks from the Texas DOT) and the inane praddle that there's a big storm coming and, depending on the outlet, it was or wasn't caused by global warming. The local media were as useless as the national, endless pictures of the traffic jams leaving the city, a shot of a water bottle blowing across the pavement. No one gave meaningful information as to alternate routes, availability of water, food, medical help, gasoline or shelter. It seemed as if no one thought informing the public was their role. As a result, people died.

So I blog. Much of my content has been anger against the endless stream of corporate welfare measures in Congress, the President's endless meaningless chatter calling "stay the course" a meaningful strategy for victory, the outrages of the Administration's fourth-amendment busting domestic espionage program and the culture of corruption that our Nation's capital has become. And while I rage against these outrages, I know something else, that America is something far better than the little men we call our government. We are not a nation of torturers, nor are we a nation that holds people without trial. We are a nation who opens our hearts and our wallets to help those in need. We believe in the values our leadership has forgotten. We believe that without our civil liberties, our rights and our values, we're no better than those we're fighting.

My hope for next year is that these values come to light. I'm not hoping for an impeachement or mass indictments of Congress, I'm hoping for a return to some semblance of statesmanship from our elected leaders. I hope that starting in 2006 I can once again hold my head high when I claim American citizenship to foreigners. I hope that we can once again be the shining light of freedom in the world rather than a developing dictatorship or worse, a Christian theocracy. I hope the voices heard abroad are the voices of Americans of character, not the dissembling and weasel wording of a Rumsfeld or a Rice or the criminality of a Rove or Delay.

More than this, I wish my readers a happy and prosperous new year.