What was that lesson again?

You’ve absorbed the calamity of Katrina and now you’re busily writing to Congress about the next disaster – perhaps response teams won’t be ready if terrorists get

hold of radiological or chemical weapons, or the nation’s inadequate flood mapping will catch up with us or water-supply security will be breached. Then there’s the remaining huge peril, after 9-11 and the levees breaking, a major earthquake in California.

You are concerned about these, right? As concerned as you are now about the people suffering the effects of Katrina? You’re ready to hold bake sales and concerts to raise money to help the government prevent a catastrophe of the kind that struck the Gulf Coast because preventing human misery is certainly better than providing comfort after the misery arrives.

The potential dangers above are all spelled out in recent federal studies, which annually warn of scores of minor and major disasters waiting to descend. What will we do about them? Invest in infrastructure, rethink the way we judge risk, elevate the role of government in our lives? Don’t be silly. We’re much happier to wait until the equivalent of a levee splits open and then blame someone – George Bush! – for not sticking his finger in the dike.

Any nation that drifts off to the sound of a news anchor reporting that 42,000 people die annually on its highways isn’t going to lose sleep about some threat in some other state that may occur sometime. We do not contemplate death on a grand scale except as spectacle. Its pyrotechnic shock and awe excites or horrifies us, but to try to talk seriously about it is to be overwhelmed and then reduced to debating the brain capacity of a rare case in Florida. Terri Schiavo was a tragedy; the death count in Iraq is, unfairly, a statistic.

President Bush was like any other American the day the levees broke in New Orleans only a little less so; millions of us were watching television and apparently knew about the break before he did. We waited to see who would provide help and, later, so did he. But that was the time that counted, the split between our laissez-faire culture of quasi-preparedness, a fault we share generally, and the time to grasp what had occurred, a responsibility that was his specifically. The president did not grasp.

He was not the only one with this responsibility. His subordinates apparently weren’t paying attention either or were at a loss; Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin traded grasp for alarm. (That wasn’t 1,000 people perishing – make that 10,000! As if several hundred wasn’t bad enough.) But when the president spoke Thursday, he said that when something of this magnitude goes so terribly wrong, “I as president am responsible for the problem.” He was, and being so he has a responsibility to come up with something better than Homeland Security reviewing the disaster plans of the nation’s major cities.

Katrina recalled two connected ideas Americans like about themselves: We are willing to give up a little safety – more advanced federally imposed evacuation plans, say – for the thrill of experiencing life as each of us sees fit. What makes this acceptable is the

second idea, our faith that the greater the danger, the bigger the hero who will save the day. The cavalry will arrive. The sheriff will clean up Dodge City. Brownie will do a heckuva job.

The loss to Americans who didn’t lose anyone in New Orleans was primarily the loss of the second idea, at least temporarily. There was no Rudy Giuliani offering calm, practical advice this time; there would be no bullhorn moment for President Bush. There was instead suffering and loss of life, accusation and recrimination, racial and class tension and enough political high-handedness to drown any hero who dared emerge.

This is not to minimize the roles of thousands of individuals who did rush to help, who risked their lives and worked endlessly to do what the government, at whatever level, failed so thoroughly to do. But New Orleans in those first days needed resources quickly on a large scale and it needed coordination of services. Most of all, it needed someone to be in charge.

The first idea, that we will surrender some government-ensured safety for self-determination, remains intact, however, just as it did after 9-11 when consensus had it that we would now appreciate government services, especially the first-line responders to emergencies. Nothing doing – the trade-off is too dear, the bureaucratic thicket too dense.

Of course it is true that not everyone who wanted to could leave New Orleans, but the remainder of us who took the required 15 seconds to see the problem beforehand weren’t worried enough to insist on a solution. That is unlikely to change no matter how sincerely we vow that we’ve learned our lesson or what dismal inadequacies subsequent investigations turn up.

Now, let’s get to work to keep that radiological material safe. Bake sale, anyone?

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.