TDB | 2005 In American History

I have to say I agree very much with my friend. Katrina was a pivotal moment in American history - the final way point of 'conservative' rule. Visions of the third-world - which Americans had learned to numb their hearts and minds against after years of starving Somali faces and ravaged Balkan villages - now showed American faces, a ravaged American city. Our hearts and minds were shocked out of a long sleep and our sense of justice was shocked into looking for answers - which proved easy to find.

The regime in power and the system it created had become deplorable in almost every sense imaginable - belligerent, callous, myopic, dishonest, greedy, self-absorbed, negligent, mean, unethical and not a little bit profligate. It had been all of these things for a long time; but the indicator lights pulsed weakly, visible only to the unimportant. Widespread discontent was masked - mistaken for disparate irritations.

But in 2005, with Katrina and its aftermath, things became clear - and Americans demanded a change. The 2006 elections repudiated the party in power - 2008 will prove a repudiation of an entire way of American life. We no longer want to be apathetic gilded-age citizens of a nation obsessed with itself, hated by the world - we want to be progressive citizens of a nation long looked to for inspiration and leadership. Because of 2005 - one of America's worst ever years - we have, in 2008, refilled our depleted stores of inspiration. After November we'll rebuild our icon of leadership.

And for all those who don't believe that History repeats itself, or that America moves cyclically - in mind and in politics - consider the following description of the watershed year that spelled doom for our first gilded-age, heralding in progressivism:

The year 1894 was the darkest that Americans had known in thirty years and finally changed the way people looked at things. What had seemed irritating now became pressing. Increasingly people saw American society as unfair. While the government promoted and subsidized the efforts of the economically ambitious, the demands of labor and the farmers went unmet. A new plutocracy of predatory capitalists, no less powerful than the planter aristocracy of the Old South, was growing rich beyond anyone's imagination. Yet they maintained a callous indifference to the welfare and safety of workers. There was no such thing as public relief, and the unemployed worker was cast adrift. The cities were becoming a polluted sprawl of human misery ... Monopolies [ ] roamed the American terrain, stifling competition, shortchanging the consumer, corrupting the political process, and giving selfish men the power to direct and dispose of the wealth of an entire society. A sense of anger spread through the land, and in the mid term elections the people sent a message.