Going through the motions

Try to make sense of this. For many years, most recently in 2004, the relevant local, state, and federal bodies have held numerous meetings, studied scenarios, even enacted war games in preparation for an expected catastrophic weather event in New Orleans. Yet, as far as one can tell, none of this translated into an actual “to do” list to be activated on the approach of a major hurricane, for example, to evacuate hospital patients and people without their own cars.

These officials have jobs, but they just preen around and go through the motions of performing them. Just as liberalism maintains the outward form of things while getting rid of their inner truth, in the same way, government officials in today’s world have the outer form of government officials, but not the reality. As T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 02, 2005 08:56 PM | Send