An open letter to my congressmembers

Dear Virginia Delegation:

I'm outraged. Outraged that we send two senators and one representative to Washington with the expectation that they will act to watch out for our country's and people's best interest. And after seeing the stunning and tragic display of incompetence, mismanagement and unresponsiveness of the federal government to the million human tragedies unfolding in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, I wonder: What have you all been doing for this time? Whatever happened to your oversight responsibilities? Your need to demand that our government protect and defend its citizens? And what do you plan to do about demanding that the executive explain its tragic bungling of response efforts? Do you plan on asking the president to answer why he'd say "no one could have predicted the tragedy in New Orleans" when it was so clearly predicted by dozens upon dozens of experts for 40 years?

One million of our countrymen are homeless, without food, shelter or medical care, without the basic elements needed for human survival. And now we find that the agencies that are supposed to have been prepared for these kinds of catastrophes have been unfunded to the ground, that plans for mobilizing hospital ships, massive evacuations, ships with drainage pumps, which at one point FEMA had and existed were allowed to languish and be forgotten or unfunded? Why has such a vital agency been allowed to be buried under a bureaucraticly inept monstrosity as is DHS? Why has FEMA been taken apart to the point that it can't mobilize? For tax cuts and a war in Iraq? Why?

For every one of us who writes to you, hundreds are expressing similar levels of outrage and disbelief in living rooms, water coolers and dining rooms across the country, all wondering how you and your 534 colleagues on the hill could have allowed this situation to get to this point. I'm asking similar questions of Senator Warner and Representative Moran. Both parties have failed us.

It is time for real, honest investigation--without the usual partisan bickering you all are so good at. We demand real efforts at figuring out what happened, at making sure that those who made the decisions that took us to this place are held accountable and lose their jobs, and at rebuilding our nation's emergency preparedness for real emergencies.

Sincerely yours,

Juan Felipe Rincon
Arlington, VA