Play blame game (Avoid the Shame Game)

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE (LETTER)
Play blame game
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0509090326sep09,0,5445024.story?coll=chi-newsopinionvoice-hed

Susan Eleuterio, Tribune
Published September 9, 2005

Highland, Ind. -- Republican spinners (and their allies in the press) have quickly named questions about the lack of federal response "the blame game." This is a clever way to cast doubt on those who have been shocked at our lazy president's failure to end his vacation; at the homeland security and Federal Emergency Management Agency's leaders' inability to watch CNN to find out what was going on, not to mention that we might have expected they actually had some kind of communications system at the White House; and at the death and suffering that seemingly could have been avoided if someone was in charge.

Rather than calling it a "game," we should demand that our political representatives and the press continue to ask the question: What happened and how do we keep it from happening again?

We have been told for nearly four years that this administration is protecting Americans from terrorism, but if it can't even protect our people from nature, why in God's name do we think it can protect us from a serious terrorist attack?

I was in a building that was evacuated on Sept. 11, 2001, in Chicago.

We had numerous drills after Sept. 11, but all the drills did was get us out into the street.

Now imagine a large American city, Chicago for instance, with thousands of people in the streets and no one organizing where they should go next.

That's what happened in New Orleans and we are naive to think it couldn't happen in other cities.

If FEMA and homeland security can't organize people in a storm situation, why do we think they can organize people in a terrorist situation?

The accounts from Mississippi and Louisiana leaders are terrifying--they ran into the exact kind of bureaucratic red tape that the Bush administration sneers at but has apparently created by putting inexperienced buddies of the president in charge.

So let's play the blame game, but call it what it really is: demanding responsibility from our leaders.

=================
In the days leading up to 9/ll our daughter and husband adopted their first baby. On the morning of September 11th our son-in-law passed through the shadow of the World Trade Center toward his office a few blocks up the street. He arrived as the horrors erupted. He saw the flames, the falling bodies, the devastation. His building was evacuated and for long awful moments he couldn’t reach his wife, our daughter, to say he was okay. Even after they connected it wasn’t until the next morning that he was able to make it home. Throughout that fearful night our daughter was alone with their new baby. Later she told us that for weeks thereafter she would lie awake at night, wondering where and when it might happen again, going to the computer at three in the morning to check out what she could about bioterrorism, germ warfare, anthrax and the vulnerability of children. The terrorists had violated a mother’s deepest space.
FULL REPORT:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050909/911_and_the_sport_of_god.php