Americans are a compassionate people. We do care about sick children. We do care about our dead and wounded vets and their families. We do care about victims of Hurricane Katrina. Empathy and compassion are what this country is about. America is about caring for one another, about being in the same boat, about being a national family. It is not about profiting from someone else's suffering, especially if that someone else is a child.

I would suggest this is true about one part of America only. But there's another part, that sees a sick kid and thinks that they shouldn't have been conceived. They look at New Orleans after Katrina and grumble about just desserts for not having gotten in their SUVs and evacuated. They look at other citizens as at best competitors, at worst predators. The rich ones live in gated communities; the poor ones have big dogs and steel bars on their windows and keep their guns loaded and handy. They think of government as something alien and outwardly, except for the military. They think of taxes as forced confiscation to be given to darker-skinned slackers, illegal immigrants, terrorists, lepers.

This part is somewhere between a quarter and a third of us. One in four, maybe one in three. They still click their heels and salute the Righteous Leader in the White House. And they are of course so, so victimized, so besieged. They know this to be true because Sean and Ann and Rush and BillO tell them so.

And there is a third America too. They don't read Salon, the Post, the Times, the New Yorker. They don't have time. They're up at five, out the door at six, struggle at a job - or two - with a demanding boss whose performance targets go up constantly without giving any help. They come home in the dark exhausted, do what they can for their families, then collapse so they can do it all over again tomorrow. To these folks SCHIP may as well be the newest rapper, or snack food, because their daylight hours are owned by The Man and they know from experience that the political powers service their own clients and buddies, who wouldn't be caught dead in a middle class neighborhood.

The third Americans are good and decent, and they are the huge majority. They are one illness or accident away from losing their homes. They are one hiccup on Wall Street away from losing their jobs. They love their kids and they are in constant anxiety. And they are invisible politically. And a lot of the first Americans scratch their heads wondering why.

We look inside the bus labeled "Conservatives" and we see this gross aberration of classic conservatism. But on a wider view, it looks to me like no one is driving the bus. Bush seems to be a minor player, not attentive or really interested in much of anything other than being told that he's great. Cheney and the neocons are trying to drive the blindly aggressive militarism, while Dobson and company are screaming about abortion, Lou Dobbs and his crowd are ready to skin all the Mexicans. Grover Norquist is spinning his wheels fantasizing about shrinking government. The Old Money - Big Business interests are often at cross purposes here, would prefer more immigration and a few may even be warming up to green technology and the need for universal health care. Tom Delay's shakedown racket is in danger of coming apart now that the Dems control Congress. And finally, the talking heads like Rush and Sean and Ann and BillO and all of Fixed Noise (TM) are flailing. Now that Karl is gone, the message of the day out of the RNC seems gone too, and the rhetoric is trying to make up for lack of direction by getting more extreme - making fun of a 7th grader is definitely indicative of desperation. The perfectly marching parade of storm troopers has turned into a herd of cats.

And here I thought I was a member of No Organized Political Party because I am a Democrat!

Maybe when institutions get too big, they naturally exceed humans ability to cope and control. Who can picture a trillion dollars? Who can think deeply and abstractly when required to respond in fifteen second sound bites? When information travels at the speed of light, how can you make strategy? And when information flows at terabits per second, how do you filter it down to what can be comprehended by a human brain?

So maybe we should all take this picture in as a cautionary tale. When it comes time - it will be soon - to fix what's wrong, we must be deliberate, but not zealous, even if zeal feels good.