Al Gore: When there is No Vision, the People Perish
by Bob Burnett
CommonDreams.org
Friday morning, when they arrived at the opening plenary session of the first-ever Sierra Club convention held at San Francisco's Moscone Center, several thousand activists got a surprise. Instead of an address by Executive Director, Carl Pope, they heard a rousing speech from former Vice President, Al Gore. (The schedule change arose because Gore was to have given a speech to state insurance commissioners, in New Orleans.)
Many in the audience remembered that Gore once had a reputation as an impassioned defender of the environment and an eloquent spokesman for human rights. Somewhere during the Clinton Presidency that Al Gore went into hibernation; his unsuccessful 2000 Presidential campaign featured robot Al - the mechanical policy wonk best known for putting crowds to sleep, rather than stirring their emotions. Gore joked that he now is a "recovering" politician; perhaps the role of an outsider empowered him to be unusually candid. Whatever the reason, the "old" Al Gore showed up on Friday.
Gore's theme was based upon the quote from Proverbs, "When there is no vision, the people perish." He dwelt at length on the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina observing, "It is important that we learn the right lessons from what happened, or else we will repeat the mistakes that were made." Gore identified three basic lessons that the American people must grasp: the first is deceptively simple - Presidents should be expected to pay attention. The former Vice President recalled that on August 6, 2001, President Bush received an intelligence briefing, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," but took no action as, "it was vacation time." Four years later, the Bush Administration received dire warnings of the damage that would be done to New Orleans, and the Gulf Coast, if Hurricane Katrina kept to its projected course; nothing was done, "It was, once again, vacation time."
The second lesson, according to Gore, involves presidential accountability. "There has been no accountability for horrible misjudgment and outright falsehood -
the tragedy of Iraq." The former VP argued that this has produced an atmosphere, in the White House, where "there is no fear of accountability" for the Federal missteps surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Gore opined that the management philosophy of the Bush Administration has been dictated by conservative lobbyist, Grover Nordquist, who famously boasted, "my goal is to get down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub." Gore indicated that, as a result, the President deliberately shrunk the size of FEMA, rendering it "weak and helpless."
more...
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0911-26.htm
I am proud that both my wife and I are members of the Sierra Club. I wish we could have seen this speech. Of course I have seen nothing about it in the M$M.
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