The Dartmouth Beacon

That was writ well-nigh fifty years before you laid waste to New Orleans. Clever, that. The fracas of storm and siege has always been a keen time to strike at the heart of a nation, as you did, if only tangentially.

But a strike it was. And a low one. Here we humble Apple Pie Eating Americans were, slurping our gangbuster-like petrol and quibbling about who’s to blame for the steadily appreciating number-placards on the highway. There we were liberating a foreign land from the death grip of a pocked creature who himself is now a dead man walking, and quibbling about if it was the right thing to do as if it had already been done. There we ran, Katrina, through the local Wal-Mart fists full of Rolled Back seventy-four packs of Coca-Cola and nine-for-a-dollar windshield wipers crying in agony over the devastation this retailer was clearly inflicting upon our sweet land of mom and pop corner stores. There we were, involved in endless, numbing debate, and unaware.

And you rolled in to the Gulf shores and informed us that we were all racists.As if we didn’t have enough to worry about. You see, these debates we have, they can enfeeble us when they lead us to question our core. You seized on that and conjured the phantasm of an evil we thought we had long ere eradicated. Certain bold voices (they may as well be surrogates of yours) denounced America as a racist nation, its president as a bigot, its culture as more hostile to one skin color than another.

But do you know what? For all the physical sears left in the winds’ wake, the attendant assault upon the hearts, souls and fabrics of this land will fail to penetrate, as so many similar subversions have.

An unhappy set, yes, has been convinced that America is a nation of permanently-anointed superiors and forever-dejected inferiors. Not only were you a racist storm, but our government was racist in its response and our society in its ethnic distribution, as if those things are molded like clay by a High Priest of Demography. These are the famously clear-headed and open-minded liberals whose sights distinguish so readily and so reflexly between white and black.
But there is a larger set, Katrina. Tempered, tested, adjusted and confident in America’s goodness and progress. They seek to identify future problems and pad against them, rather than disinter past wedges. We’ll let a larger and wiser man than Normal Mailer speak for them. We’ll let Walt Whitman, former printer’s apprentice, nurse of ailing Union Soldiers, and proud Free Soil ex-Democrat, speak to the mettle of America:

Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,)
To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane.

Pax Vobiscum,

The Editors