The Big Picture and the Closeup

It is easy to imagine now, if TSA had leveled with us about what it proposed to do, what members of the public would have said what they felt about government official using radiation to take revealing pictures of them, and, as an alternative, literally groping their “privates.” TSA would be expected to respond with arguments about the recent attempted “underwear bomber,” and how these searches would make us all safer. And then a policy calculation in which the public was involved and invested could have been made, by an agency better advised about how the public felt.

Katrina holds huge lessons for us, and they are both perennial and urgent. We should be respecting nature more, and not trying so very hard to bend it to our commercial purposes. We should be recognizing the coming demise of a fossil fuel economy, and ending the kind of foreign and military policy that will leave us undefended against nature’s worst. We should be waging war on poverty again, and not on the poor, and we should be demanding accountability of the rich, not giving them further tax cuts. There is nothing new in these lessons, but there is doubtless something newly urgent. They say that hurricanes are increasing in size and frequency; Katrina’s kin will be calling again soon.