(from "To Those Born Later" by Bertolt Brecht)

"They didn't have to die", the coroner tells us when talking about the deaths at St. Rita's Nursing Home in the floating parish of St. Bernard. No, they didn't have to die, and neither did those who died from lack of water, who died of gunshot wounds, who died of rising waters, their bodies then consumed by water reptiles, wild dogs, carried away in a toxic slumber. How many didn't have to die? We may never know.

We know of the deaths at St. Rita's and now the home's owners' wrists are ringed in steel, their fingers licked with printing ink. Where are the other arrests? Why hasn't Chertoff been arrested for gross negligence, Brown for negligent homicide? Why is there no talk of Bush's culpability? He has taken responsibility for the failures of his government, but he has not faced the consequences of those failures. Will he ever? Or will we choose to forget the failings, shameful as they were, and let him slip into the drifting sands of history?

We are living in a soaking wet, cardboard house, and the walls have already collapsed around us. We are fooled by the dark night that fills in the space, giving us the appearance of shelter. The stars don't shine -- the air is too polluted. The moon is hidden behind storm clouds. We are here in the floodwater, and many of us are unable to swim. Though the waters haven't succumbed us we know we are losing to the deluge. We can't stand. The ground is slick with petrol and the slippery mess left from the dead.

It is too much to think of all this just days after the anniversary of that failure of the imagination four years ago. Here in Chicago the leaves of young trees are ringed in umber; they are thirsting for water this summer of drought. Storms circle our eastern coasts while the sun shines mercilessly on grain fields across our country's center. Our leaders fight against science, insist we are living in the American Century of progress and hope, oblivious to the thermometer on the back porch and its ever-rising temperature. We are drowning in a flood of our own making and dying of thirst.

On CNN, a doctor cries in Houston after his rescue in New Orleans, after he was forbidden to practice in the makeshift hospital of Louis Armstrong Airport by the feeble-minded minions of a horse show operator. He has nothing, again, the same feeling of emptiness as when he fled Saigon thirty years ago, but now he and his wife have no assumption of a better future. Minutes later, a young girl grieves for the death of her lover, a man she saw die in the waters around her house as he swam between two wafting houses.

A haggard white couple tells us why the Crescent City Connection failed to connect New Orleanians with safety, dry ground. The police chief of white flight Gretna tells us, "If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged." His officers shot above the looters-to-be and turned them away, certain that the dozens of wheel-chair bound grandparents and women with young children would breach their "locked down and secure" village. Still Bush's faith-filled supporters insist the man-made disaster that came after the nature-made catastrophe had nothing to do with race.

And to think that now we are in the time of "good news" spreading. Steven Segal has his SWAT suit on, ready for action, in the parking lot of Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas, and now we know forty-five people died in Tenet Hosptial, that Uptown shelter that called out for help just a day after the levees broke. Remember them? Heretik Joe forwarded their email to me. But still it was days and days before they were rescued, leaving the already dead and the recently dead in the hospital-turned-bathtub.

I wondered where our heart was, then went to Houston and found it in the overflowing numbers of volunteers. Our leaders and their followers have no moral center. Their souls are bankrupt, running black with the blood of these four years of death in New York, Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans. And they have the gall to call themselves "pro-life." All evidence shows that they are in bed with Santa Muerte herself, and like her, dangle our stolen hearts around their sinewy necks.

I'm still heartsick, as you are too. Even now, when I know that it is just days before I will be with my husband again, my heart is broken. S called me today and he might leave tomorrow, getting him here in our house sooner, sooner. I can't wait to be with him, to be held by him for days in our little house, our domus, our shelter. It feels like a card house without him.

In Brecht's closing lines is the assumption that there will be an emergence from the flood and that through it the past will be remembered and learned from. But clearly we have no sense of history, no sense of the past. Across the blogosphere are discussions, pronouncements, of how exceptional this event was ("unprecedented!"), and how even the violence that followed the flood was unique to this catastrophe. Only a few decades after violence peppered Louisiana (remember the white picnickers who ate their red beans and rice while the lynch-dead's feet rustled through their bonnets?), violence so extreme and so random that it led to a mass exodus to Chicago and Saint Louis, there has been another exodus of internally displaced persons, Americans forced to flee in their own country, again from a lack of security and the black hole left by failed government. This isn't exceptional and it wasn't a surprise. Ask the raped women of Sarejevo, the torn-apart children of Rwanda what happens when there is no security, when government fails. They will tell you.

Still, over forty percent of our neighbors and relatives think Bush is doing a good job. They think this is all government is capable of (or worse, should be capable of), forgetting, as usual, that this is all this government is capable of. How can we last three more years? Will there still be a United States of America at the end of this running disaster's term, or only varying states of misery here and in those corners of the world we can't seem to stay away from? Today I passed a bargain-basement fortune teller on Ashland Avenue who promised $10 readings for all walk-ins. I thought about going in and asking her for a story of the future of this place that defines who we are, but I knew my ten dollars would be better spent with a donation to Red Cross.

The future is made of the present moment, and our actions are our only true possessions. It's no wonder our house is soaked through, contaminated with human waste and chemicals, and that we're here without a roof under a blood hot sun. Four and a half years into this disaster and here we are. We've got no choice but to rebuild. I just hope we have the good sense to reinforce the levees, restore the shorelands, build on higher ground. Meanwhile, we've got to get out of the house and start helping our neighbors swim out of this mess. If we don't do it, no one will.