The Japanese elections are tomorrow. For those of you who were following the discussion following my post of an article by Jeffrey Laurenti of the Century Foundation, here is a very interesting response by Ambassador Kazuhiko Togo, a career Japanese diplomat who was most recently ambassador to the Netherlands (his grandfather was Japanese foreign minister during WWII). My thanks to Ambassador Togo for taking the time to give us a genuinely Japanese perspective on these issues.
In response to Juliette's post on FEMA, check out Dan K's comment to my post a while ago "Just Like Haiti." He dug out the following gem from the 2000 Texas Republican Party Platform:
Civil Defense - America had a strong, grassroots-based civilian defense system with county level volunteers and local leadership from the World War I era until the establishment of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Now local civil defense coordinators have been replaced with federally-controlled emergency management coordinators. The priority has changed from "defending" the citizens in an emergency to "managing" the citizens. The Party supports the restoration of our civil defense system. A non-partisan effort should be made to organize communication and emergency response training for citizens to assist in times of emergency, and the local county government should appoint a civilian defense coordinator. Elected county officials should be in charge of decisions affecting the local community.
As Dan K points out, what happened to FEMA was not accidental. It was ideology.
On August 28, 1963, almost exactly the anniversary of the day Katrina hit New Orleans, Martin Luther King stood at the Lincoln Memorial and looked out at a million people and told them and people across America and around the world that he had a dream. He spoke with the combination of fury and faith that we need today.
