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Author: S. D. Harrell

Article source: http://thepoliticalview.com/. Used with author's permission.

Just who are "the people?" It appears some of our politicians haven't quite got a handle on that. Or of their job descriptions, for that matter. They need to get back to basics concerning the reason for their inhabitation of offices in the Capitol complex and the White House. So maybe the question should be, "Who are the people in the eyes of politicians?" To politicians are they, as experience and time confirms, only those scant few they pay attention to nominally around election time and designated by the term "voter" and the other scant few they pay attention to feverishly in elections and out who go by the term "donor." And if they are, who are those who make up the vast portion of Americans who do not fall into either of these categories? And do they have leaders?

The framers of the constitution visualized a government as President Abraham Lincoln stated so powerfully, "of the people, by the people, for the people." How many times have we heard that refrain? And yet it has never lost the force of its intellectual impact. The reason why this government exists. For the people. And yet there has developed a political culture in Washington that acts as if "the people" mainly consists of the three branches of government and their corporate counterparts with whom they exchange wealth and power in a kind of perpetual dance of executive musical chairs.

The people. We have seen them recently scattered like sheep with no shepherd. Even now wandering the landscape of the country seeking shelter, food, comfort and a place of being. Hoping that the insurance companies will pay and that aid will continue until they live self-reliantly again.

Yet for every situation that highlights the harsh realities of life, there is a grace, given by God to make humanity's tenure upon this planet more tolerable. And sometimes that grace is also "the people."

Because "the people" are not only those who vote and those who don't. They also consist of those voting races of all classes who have a peculiar sympathy for those who don't. And sometimes these "people" vote not only for issues concerning themselves but they vote sacrificially. They vote for the sake of "the people" and their vote-as-sacrifice appears to highlight a mercy of God in this country and others determining that there should be another hidden layer of government between elected officials and the great disillusioned and disenfranchised masses. If it were not so, what a pitiable place America and like-nations would be, resembling that amoral hell-hole referred to as political Washington.

It was the rage of these kinds of people that rocked Washington into action following the collapse of the Hurricane Katrina response. And their anger wasn't triggered by any personal trial or agony, it was created and fomented by watching the pain of those waiting in agony in New Orleans.

The leaders in Washington seem to have forgotten that voters, unlike themselves, do not live in a vacuum. They live in families and cooperatives untainted by political self-interest. They live with others who have incompatible lifestyles who they manage to care about nonetheless. They have relatives and friends who are poor and struggling and single and sinful, yet they want their government to do them no harm. Neither establishing policies that would further impoverish them in their economics nor in their immoralities.

Hurricane Katrina opened the eyes of many Americans who found during their empathetic suffering with those in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama, an utter unfamiliarity in many of their leaders in Washington, congressmen and women lethargically gathering for a second vote for relief aid, as the first vote many of them missed because they had determined that they would finish their vacations while New Orleans sat mourning in foul and diseased water. They did not have to attend to pass the first vote and, predictably, it passed without them, but sometimes symbolic representation can mean everything as President Bush learned first hand.

The Storm also startled many other Americans into the truth of their own personal responsibilities to "the people," not only charitably but politically. And perhaps these two words will become synonymous for them during the next election cycle.

If, as has been said, each life constitutes a world and when a person dies a world of possibilities dies with him, a thousand worlds and counting have died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and attention must be paid. Most definitely the attention being paid by millions of Americans, eyes open, less naïve, more aware. Those who died and lived in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama following the hurricane's destruction must not be cryptically forgotten. Not because some of them may have been voters and most certainly few of them were donors, but because they were "the people."