Angry and Depressed

Salon.com Life | I’m filled with rage
I don’t know what to do with my rage. I can’t hold it inside me like this, but every time it seems to dissipate, and I’ve forgotten, as I have the luxury of doing, what a sorry, sad, unjust and, yes, despicable state of affairs we’ve galloped merrily into, something dramatically and heart-wrenchingly demands that my rage be acknowledged. And frankly — it’s necessary to be reminded of these things.

And here I thought I was the only one.

This, by the way, is from a letter to Cary Tennis — salon.com’s advice columnist extraordinare.

I’m not kidding around when I tell you that I’ve been seriously considering no longer reading the news in the morning. Every day it’s one or two or ten more reasons to feel depressed and anxious about the direction our country is taking. This morning, for example:

  • The Bush administration is cutting the protected environment for the endangered snowy plover back by 40%. This is only the latest in a long series of environmental protection cuts.
  • Former FEMA director Mike “Brownie” Brown is being kept on at full pay to help the agency investigate why it failed so miserably during the Hurrican Katrina crisis.

Cary advises the letter-writer to get involved in some protests — and to seek psychiatric help if his violent fantasies become too much to resist. Good advice, I suppose. Like the letter-writer, though, I find myself frustrated by the ineffectiveness of protest. People just don’t seem to get it no matter how simply you lay it out for them. All protesting does, for me at least, is further inflame my anger and despair.

Here’s just how bad it’s become. Mark and I have agreed that we both feel perversely relieved that at least we’ll probably be DEAD by the time all the environmental and political damage wrought by the Bush administration comes to fruition. We’ve agreed that we’re glad we don’t have any children who will have to live in a world where there aren’t any more snowy plovers.

I should probably just quit reading the news.

———

[Update 10:00 am]

I just got this in my Daily Ray of Hope email from the Sierra Club:

Where there is vision, the people prosper and flourish, and the natural world recovers, and our communities recover. The good news is we know what to do. The good news is, we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming. We have all the technologies we need, more are being developed, and as they become available and become more affordable when produced in scale, they will make it easier to respond. But we should not wait, we cannot wait, we must not wait, we have every thing we need – save perhaps political will. And in our democracy, political will is a renewable resource.

– Former Vice President Al Gore earlier this month at the Sierra Summit

Posted by RebeccaHartong on September 27, 2005 under Uncategorized

2 Comments to Read


  1. I saw that bit about Brownie still getting full pay and posted my disgust on one of the forums I frequent. One reply likened it to the CEO of a corporation sticking around to smooth out a transition, but of course this CEO already resigned and for incompetency any other CEO might have lost even his golden parachute for. But this reply takes the cake:

    Don’t you ever get tired of “rushing to judgement” about anybody who looks like a Republican? The main thing that he is “guilty” of is being lousy on TV. Because he went on TV and acted like a deer in front of headlights, he therefore must be an idiot who has no idea what he is doing. Perhaps FEMA should have sent their public relations person instead of their director. It turns out there is a local connection with the man to Oklahoma. He said he was in charge of the emergency operations in Enid. That got the national media all excited and I heard people on national TV say he never did any such thing. The Tulsa media actually went to Enid and the city manager from that time said that yes indeed, he did exactly that. He couldn’t understand why the national media was distorting that. Then the Tulsa media went office to office interviewing people who had worked with him. They started each interview asking if they were a Republican or a Democrat. It was about half and half. But EVERY ONE of them thought the national media coverage was totally unfair and that the director had done a fine job while he worked in Enid. He was “the best liked person” in the office. Considered a man of integrity and very hard-working. Not an idiot. Not a person who shirked his duties. Not a man that played golf every day.

    Once again, for the millionth time, it is amazing that any “regular people” every go to Washington to work at all. The pay is worse than you would get in the private sector and you always know that the vultures could descend on your bleeding corpse at any moment regardless of whether or not you do your job.

    More generally, when I was a grad student assisting with Public Administration classes, we studied how bureaucracy works in various departments. A new President comes in and picks his political appointees. (Subject to Congressional approval.) In most departments that amounts to the Director and perhaps his Deputy. Everybody else that works there is “career State Department” or “career EPA.” It’s a total joke to think that the FEMA response to Katrina balances on the actions of the director. There are thousands of people there who are supposed to be professionals in this field. The Director “sets the tone” but the whole organization should still function even if he drops dead of a heart attack. Otherwise we have to have some “super CEO type” as every political appointment and that’s just not realistic. Those types of people don’t WANT to serve in government. They don’t like the money and they don’t want anything to do with the press or the possible disasters which THEY would be blamed for. Just like what happened after Katrina. (Basically the same thing that happened after Hugo and Andrew as well although I don’t remember the head of FEMA being forced out of office then.)

    I post it here in its entirety to show the lengths Bush defenders will go to support anyone in the administration, even those who clearly did not do their job, much less know how to do it. Why anyone would go this far to defend someone so inept that shows so poorly on Bush himself is beyond me. I particularly like the revisionism at the end on Hugo and Andrew considering Bush himself praised Clinton-era FEMA and vowed to continue its exemplary service. This responder can’t even stop from taking another dig at his personal hate, Clinton. :)

    2. Michael Lewis on September 27th, 2005 at 12:21 pm

  2. Hey guys, I know how you feel. I went through the same thing in the 90′s with that bulbous red nosed, lying idiot. But believe me, your guys will eventually win again and Bush won’t have done nearly as much damage to the country as you thought him capable of doing.

    3. Hank Rearden on October 1st, 2005 at 11:53 am

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