Unless you’ve been living in a cave, or (perversely enough) in New Orleans, you’ve no doubt heard or seen something by this point relating to the depressing role of race and class in the government response to this tragedy.  Some points that need to be made have been, but what’s been bugging me, and what I’m about to try to express, is that race is only peripherally a factor in all this. I’m not a political writer, being neither very political nor a very good writer, but this all touches on an ugly reality I’ve seen in this country, one which has never been seriously addressed in our national discourse.

Kanye West, among many others, believes that George Bush does not care about black people. In the face of the evidence, he’s right. He’s also wrong. Truth is, George Bush does indeed not care about black people, but only because politicians at the national level do not care about people. With no extra qualifiers. Blacks, whites, gays, soccer moms, WASPy New England royalty: your representatives in Washington do not care about you. They simply don’t have the time. Our political system is broken. It’s broken in such a way that successful politicians (ie those that get re-elected) do not have time to do their jobs in addressing the needs of the people.

In Washington we have created, or allowed to evolve, a severely weird ecosystem. The most highly adapted and successful inhabitants of this environment are those that have their priorities in order:

1. Survival, or their campaign. The campaign never ends anymore, and in order to survive, the campaign must be their sole focus.
2. Money, or donors. Private or corporate, though corporations have more money and thus more influence.
3. Votes, or those votes which can be swayed using the money the politician has received from donors.

Do you see people anywhere in that list? Yes, money is donated by people, but it’s such a tiny number of people that it amounts to a statistical anomaly. And yes, votes come from people as well, but they are merely possessions that politicians attempt to buy using the currency of push-button issues and slick campaigns. It is a closed system: survive, to survive get votes, to get votes get money, to get money keep the donors happy. There is no room for real people and their concerns, needs, or everyday lives. Or, in the case of a national disaster of this scale with so many everyday people in mortal danger, their very lives themselves.

As this is my blog and not a debate, we’ll forgo any more rhetoric and accept that this is simply a truth. It’s a truth many people dismiss as pessimistic, which it is, but it’s still a truth. The larger part of the American people accept it — whether they can or bother to articulate it or not, they believe their vote doesn’t really matter.

I don’t have any platitudes about making a difference and voting or dying (though there were surely those in New Orleans who, had they voted, would be alive today) but I do have hope. I have the hope that if someone, or a group of someones, could get the American people to care, to raise their voices and express what’s on their minds, yell and scream about what’s on their minds, get ignant about what’s on their minds — if that could happen, it would amount to a bloodless revolution in this country. But before we have a revolution, we have to all agree that what we have now doesn’t work. In the face of what goes on in this country every day, not even considering the tragedy upon preventable tragedy we’ve seen recently, you’d think that would be the easy part. But here we are, predictably and tragically dividing along lines of race and poverty.