Who needs "A Village"?

Hillary Clinton's book title,"It Takes a Village" struck the chord of community responsibility,which is a notion the Faux-Cons cannot abide. Who needs a village, indeed, who needs social security, or even a national policy and organization to respond to emergencies?

The new vision the Faux-cons are now preaching was precisely articulated by one of their main men, Darrell Issa, R=California. Today he said, regarding the deplorable national response to Katrina: "What you're seeing here is the reason that ... you need to count on yourselves because you can't count on Congress to be there for you," he said. "You have to be your own first line of defense." Listen closely to Chertoff, too, and you'll hear him say the same thing. The message for the next weeks and months for the right is this--the disastrous federal response can be spun as a new (and rational and, of course, "caring") notion that we are all on our own.

So, in fact, the blame game is being played big time by Brown, Chertoff, and Andrew Card who don't hesitate in point accusing fingers at Gov. Blanco (LA) and Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. The door is open to push away any sense of national responsibility and ultimately allow federal agencies wither. In fact, the logical end of the Faux-Con ideology is "every person for themselves." The Superdome was a microcosm of such a condition and it was hell on earth. But just as the Patriot Act was the policy, nay the law, that emerged from the attack on the Twin Tower and Pentagon, we can at least expect the policy of individual responsibility in crisis to emerge from this.

Of course we all have some responsibility to take care of ourselves--lock your doors before leaving the house; look both ways before crossing a street...But we can't investigate the robbery when our houses are burgled anyway; when hit by a drunk driver, we can't be accused of not properly directing traffic! We do inhabit "villages" and the inhabitants of civil societies take personal responsibility for what they can, and they take communal responsibility, too. The second concern is what establishes and maintains humane and civil social structures.

Don't allow the new vision of "taking care of ourselves" to make us a country of paranoid, self-centered survivalists.