I am not satisfied being pissed off at Bush for condemning thousands to at least a prolonged horrorshow, if not sickness, dehumanization and possible death.

I am not satisfied choking back tears as I watch, not just young mothers, but serious young black men speak out for the children in their charge...or absolutely stunned innocent tourists and bystanders who didn't imagine something like this could suddenly develop in a matter of a few hours, a few days, in America.

I am not satisfied with the admirable efforts of some few journalists to get the administration and military spokesmen out of their trances with simple facts: 2000 people in the convention center down the street from the superdome, and those people have no food or water for 5 days. Nothing....while Chertoff asserts that there are staging areas of food and water within walking distance of any survivors now, and they will all be fine by this weekend if they just quit shooting at the rescuers.

I am not satisfied with the feeling inside me that the America I have always hoped was there, has never been there. Not for anyone.

No less a philosopher than Charles Manson predicted that America would come apart along a racial fault line within our life times...his vision of Helter Skelter was no doubt honed in the prisons and juvenile halls of the southeast, where he was from.

It was Manson's vision that came back to haunt me as I watched television today, and saw the way that the black population was being depicted, utterly without dignity. Even the well-meaning reporters focused on the children's helplessness, not on the parent's dignity or strength.

I could imagine the anger rise in thousands of black men and women across the country as they saw what was being done to their people, officially and unofficially, on purpose and unconsciously, reduced to something less than Rwandan refugees, something less than the cattle washed inland in Sumatra. If there isn't a new political movement comes out of this within 6 months, I will be very surprised.

This is the turning point, or more fashionably, the tipping point. The precarious illusions of a whole nation have depended upon a spun sugar foundation of lies, lies about compassion, dignity, and the value of human life. We have let Katrina take out Bush's trash. And the nation that accepts that action, is not the America I was prepared to die in all this time.

But I am not satisfied with my own dissatisfaction. How have I contributed to this mess? Where could I have put a foot down or raised a voice that might have rippled through time and contributed somehow to a stronger edifice of human values than we see washed up at our feet today?

What really matters? The survivors say that they are grateful for their health, their lives, and their status and possessions don't count. The fact is that six months from now, when they find out they have been put in steerage and the entryways have all been locked on them, as the ship goes down, they will not be grateful. The blacks who see their people treated like expendable "assets" in the military jargon of the day, they will not be grateful.

The smart white kids and anyone with a heart will not be grateful for a society sliced up the belly. A society skinned and quartered not by a muggers knife, not by an act of god, but by the timidity and self absorption of a generation of leaders. They are mostly men, but women too, who have forgotten that courage is more important than prudence in the securing of human dignity against neglect, in the protection of the human spirit against corruption.

Without courage, no other quality can be put into play. We have shipped our courage off to suffer faceless conscription in the foreign puzzle of Iraq, and at home we wring our hands or hide behind the glowing phosphor of the lie machine.

I have seen some courage today among survivors in New Orleans. It is on the other side of the mountain. It isn't mine, and I don't feel satisfied at all.