James Carroll on the truths laid bare by Katrina.

Katrina's truths - The Boston Globe: "Hurricane Katrina was more than a natural disaster. It was a political epiphany, laying bare difficult truths from which, mainly, the United States has been in flight. Most obviously, the flooding of the cities and towns along the Gulf Coast has pulled a curtain back on a huge population of desperately impoverished people. The ''other' America, as Michael Harrington called it a generation ago, has shown itself as hardly ever before. The wealthiest nation on earth has its hidden legion of have-nots, and all at once the rest of us saw them. The scandal of rank poverty was exposed, and if beholding it was like seeing something indecent, that's because such poverty in this nation is exactly that -- indecent.

At the same time, the abstraction of ''poverty' has been made concrete. Face after anguished face appeared on television to tell us, This is what it is like to live with absolutely no margin of safety or comfort. There was dignity in those faces, at times nobility. Mostly, though, there was pain. Diabetics without insulin, babies without diapers, evacuees with no mode of transport, urban hospital workers entirely without backup. America has its river of refugees now, tens of thousands of people who, herded into sports palaces-turned-charnel-houses, are alike in having nothing to return to.

The spectacle of failure, how for days the government was powerless to help such people, only put on display how government was already failing them and everyone else. Here was Katrina's second main epiphany -- what it means that the United States, after a generation of tax-cutting and downsizing, has eviscerated the public sector's capacity for supporting the common good. The neglect of civic infrastructure, the destruction of social services, the abandonment of the safety net, the myth of ''privatization,' the perverse idea, dating to the Reagan era, that government is the enemy: It all adds up to what we saw last week -- government not as the enemy, but as the incompetent, impotent bystander. The bystander-in-chief, of course, is George W. Bush, whose whining self-obsession perfectly embodies what America has done to itself.

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