Tracey Barnett: Too easy to just blame America

You can try to pummel sadness with your fists but it won't go away. You can point a finger at dysfunctional systems and bureaucrats and still not help anyone heal. You can wake up every morning and see one ineffectual person against a floodgate of tragedy.

Whatever you've felt when seeing New Orleans swallowed into the Gulf, you have to admit the dirtiest truth of all. Your first reaction was, "Those poor people."

But your second reaction is the one that counts. It hit you viscerally.

You asked yourself, "How could society fall so quickly? How could our veneer of decency be that thin?"

I am watching my fellow Americans drown. They are drowning in acronyms, and complacency and unspoken assumptions.

Mother Nature has exposed the American underbelly, split in two. Within a week, bared for all to see were the ugly issues of racism, poverty, misdirected bureaucracy and fumbled leadership. I never imagined I would see it this naked.

But it's not you. Not your home, your country or your people. Your comfort is, "We would do better".

When England's Daily Telegraph tried to answer "Is it all Bush's fault?" this week in a succinct two-paragraph sound bite, it talked about diffuse power in the US system between cities, states and federal entities. It reached the conclusion, "But the truth is that Katrina was an all-American failure."

How dare you? How dare you echo the same tunnelled flame-throwing response as the bewildered people in the midst of it?

How dare you not see that by distancing yourselves you will enable the tragedy to be repeated, perhaps in another time, or in another place where your own experience may not be thousands of miles away?

"An all-American failure" means it is not your failure. The same finger-pointing, the same disowning, has just moved up the line from parish, to state, to country.

It means you don't have to turn your head to examine how the poorest and weakest among you would fare in the same boat.

Do you understand what you are watching on the news tonight? Are you just watching an infrastructure dissipated into chaos or are you watching that one piece of your own humanity you don't want to see?

Would you rob any store you could find to feed your loved ones? Yes. Steal a car or a boat at gunpoint to escape rising waters and bring your family to safety? Yes.

But the moral questions here got far uglier than that. Would you be part of the predatory lawlessness that erupted with no policing or societal structure to make anyone safe?

It is ugly. But what is more horrifying - a system that has 100 surgeons and paramedics ineffectually marooned in a mobile hospital in Mississippi or a president who arrived for a photo op five days after the storm hit? That ugliness extends to white people with dry feet.

Yes, there are people to blame. Plenty. Heads will roll, and the accusatory shouting isn't likely to quieten any time soon. It is so easy to put the adjectives in place - laxity, corpulence, arrogance.

But none of us can shrug our shoulders in judgment or disbelief until we've asked ourselves if that person in the mirror this morning looks even remotely like some rooftop survivor clutching a gun and pillaged food, or a devastated local parish president, or an exhausted volunteer medic.

If you see them reflected back at you, then you have little choice.

For now, push judgment aside in favour of making some small specific action that will in some way make it better from wherever your two capable feet stand today.

The tragedy in New Orleans for those of us who remain on higher ground is that now we may not see the comfort of civilisation as anything but fragile. Perhaps that is the only judgment that will linger when the shouting is all over.

* Tracey Barnett is an American journalist working in Auckland.