By Gary Earl Ross
Buffalo, NY – Dear Mr. Bush:
When you ran for the presidency in 2000, you espoused a philosophy called "compassionate conservatism." You came across as a folksy kind of guy who could share a beer with the average Joe. There was nothing professorial or profound about you. That was your appeal. You were Gary Cooper in "Meet John Doe," Jimmy Stewart in just about everything except "Vertigo," and you wrapped yourself in the banner of Christianity.
Abraham Lincoln once said, "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." The American people gave you power. And what did you do with it? You savaged the environment. You presided over the largest ever transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper class. You pushed through education reforms based on fraudulent Texas data. You used the tragedy of 9/11 to wage a war you had planned before the attack, on a country that had nothing to do with the attack. You justified the invasion of Iraq with fraudulent intelligence and allowed the very terrorists you decried to gain a significant foothold there. You permitted the real 9/11 perpetrators to escape by not committing the necessary resources to Afghanistan and their capture. You turned a record budget surplus into a record deficit. You oversaw steady increases in the ranks of the poor.
But Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the final truth of compassionate conservatism as Affirmative Inaction. While local and state officials share the blame, it is shameful that the federal government took five days to respond. The same Homeland Security Department that is supposed to make us all safe, that practically strip-searches little old ladies at airports, could not verify the resume submitted by your former FEMA director, whose job with an Arabian horse association suggests he can wield a shovel, perhaps the skill most necessary in an administration predicated on lies and misdirection. Official ineptitude cost lives, but they were for the most part poor lives, invisible lives, lives undreamt of by compassionate conservatism.
As a philosophy, it has been examined and found wanting. It is not that you don't care about black people or the poor. You can't care about what you don't know. You don't know the poor, those left behind. You don't even know the middle class that put you in office.
You will never feel what those of us with children in Iraq feel whenever a headline says, "U.S. soldiers killed." You will never know the dread of seeing a strange dark car parked outside your house. You will never feel the hunger and desperation that drove flood survivors to break into stores for food. You will never know the horror of abandoned nursing home residents drowning in their beds-a horror far too imaginable for those of us with loved ones in nursing homes. The Bush table has always been blessed in its bounty, with time for golf with Daddy and booze for the girls and everything you could possibly need.
After a life of privilege and protection, of bail-out after rescue, you don't have a single empathetic bone in your body. That is the real tragedy. May history have mercy on your soul.
Sincerely, Gary Earl Ross
Listener-Commentator Gary Earl Ross is a professor at UB's Educational Opportunity Center who has a son serving in Iraq and a father in a nursing home.
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