Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Great Line of the Day

From our favourite president -- I mean Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard -- speaking to the Today Show: "So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."
There is a lot of truth to this, isn't there? I know what he means.
We all screw up in our jobs sometimes -- in New Orleans, of course, the screwups were monumental and deadly. But if we just CARE about what we do, rather than caring only about lawsuits and asscovering, well, at least then, our errors will be made on the side of humanity. . .
For example, last week, it might have turned out to have been a mistake for FEMA to let into the city all those hundreds of people who wanted to help, the firefighters from Houston and the rescue boats from Florida and the bus drivers from Chicago and the Red Cross workers and the Cuban doctors -- yes, they might have got themselves shot at or needed rescuing themselves or they might have been drowned themselves, some of them.
But in the end, they couldn't possibly have harmed any one more than FEMA did by not being there at all. And so in the end, the "error" of letting them in would have been forgiveable because it would have been an error on the side of humanity. It would have been the mistake of a caring idiot.

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