New Orleans as Metaphor

[soupkitchen]

As real as the tragedy occurring in New Orleans is, the event represents a metaphor for what is happening to the economic safety net of the entire country.
Since the New Deal we have been living in a country where the flood of economic chaos has been held in check by governmentally constructed levees.
Now these levees where always insufficient to deal with the problem, but when the choice came to shore them up with wiser, more proactive governmental investing (health care for one) or just ignore the structural problems knowing the people on the high ground would be all right in a disaster the choice was made to ignore the structural problems.
Well, the levees broke and the people on the complacent high ground are pretty much fucked too. Though, of course, not as thoroughly fucked as the people who serviced their gracious lives.
The point here is that no matter how much Republicans want to ignore the economic divide in this country, we are all in this together. When the structural levees that are holding economic chaos in check are breeched (and here New Orleans might not be just metaphor but a harbinger) everybody is going to suffer. To think otherwise is foolish, as the French aristocrats, among other privilege classes, found out years ago.
So does the Democratic party make this case, or have our leaders been living in the Garden Districts of the country for so long they no longer see the problem for what it is. A structural failure waiting to happen. A problems that is not going to be solved by applying more sand bags to the old structures, but require a totally new approach to save our way of life. HMO's, private medical accounts, medicare prescriptions are just more sandbags when we need a new sea wall of Universal Coverage. Such are the choices facing us as a society. And I only hope we can learn from the gruesome metaphor offered by New Orleans.