The Big Picture and the Closeup

Time to rid ourselves of some laws that block up the hallways of our national home and impede the country’s progress. I have three that I would suggest hauling away.

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.

With good leadership, with Eisenhowers and Roosevelts, young men and women will predictably enlist in acceptable numbers. With bad leadership, the discipline of the enlistment market will act as a check. It would be both foolhardy and morally wrong to remove that check.