It’s almost too horrible to imagine. New Orleans, an American jewel, reduced to rubble. Corpses floating on the water. Police and firefighters committing suicide in the face of heat, sorrow and anger beyond my imagination. There is no excuse. None. Period.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the government and politicians won’t look for others to blame. It doesn’t mean that the chicken-hawks who drew our great nation into war based on lies will admit to responsibility. In fact, all signs point to a never ending game of responsibility dodge-ball.

“It’s criminal. From what you’re hearing, the people trapped in New Orleans are nothing but looters…If you ain’t got no money in America, you’re on your own.” Malik Rahim’s voice crackled in defiance and frustration. Rahim, recent Green Party candidate for New Orleans City Council, showed the sort of resolve and maturity that I know I don’t possess.

“New Orleans took all the Housing and Urban Development money it could get to tear down public housing, and families and neighbors who’d relied on each other for generations were uprooted and torn apart.” Rahim told the San Francisco Bay View. “The hurricane hit at the end of the month, the time when poor people are the most vulnerable.”

We’ve all seen the faces of angry people on TV. People pushed to the emotional edge by the horror of what they have seen. The Mayor and Governor crying for justice, when it was their responsibility to protect the citizens of New Orleans. You would think that they were caught off guard by this sort of flooding, fires and death. You would be wrong. From the newspaper The Times - Picuyne to university studies to FEMA forecasts, the politicians and bureaucrats new this was a possibility. In fact, it was likely in the event of a large storm hitting New Orleans. Like those who can’t turn their eyes from a horrible accident, they stood immobilized by…by what? Fear? Maybe, but just maybe by budget cuts and unimaginable disregard for the lives of the poor.

We don’t live in New Orleans. We don’t face the sort of terror from the sea that the people along the Gulf Coast have experienced. Even so, many of the sorts of government decisions that caused so much death and destruction down there are part and parcel of every day government decisions right here in York County.

The county government was more than happy to spend your tax dollars to bring a huge new source of air pollution into the county in the form of a gas-fired power plant planned for Fort Mill. The plant, to have been built by Calpine, a California based energy hustler, would have spewed forth tons of air pollution yearly, all to provide electricity for out-of-state consumers. The county government continues to provide tax subsidies to Duke Power for their nuclear nightmare-in-waiting near Clover. The same sort of hubris that lead to so much death in New Orleans shows here in never-tried evacuation plans for those of us who live close enough to the plant to suck down a lethal dose of radiation in the event of an accident.

Our county government has done no more to protect you than the city, state and federal government have done to protect the people of New Orleans. Evacuation plans are inadequate at best. Like New Orleans’ plans, ours have never been tested in any meaningful way. Like the poor of New Orleans and the surrounding area, we are disposable commodities in the calculations of the money grubbers who decide who lives and who dies based on which decisions make the most profit.

Government should be, at least in part, a counter-balance to the influence of corporate power and wealth. Instead, it has been used to expand the power of the already too powerful, and the poor of New Orleans are just the latest causalities of that power. And my friends, you are I are subject to this same horrible fact: if there is money to be made by the right people, nothing else will matter.