Where is the Outrage?

This isn't going to be a very coherent post==I've been traveling all day; the weather snafus turned a four hour door-to-door trip into thirteen hours--but I want to add a little to Barb's quite wonderful post.

The people who did quite heroic acts during the Holocaust to save Jews or other targeted people were usually ordinary people whose only distinguishing trait was that in ordinary times they usually did the right thing--helped the homeless, were open to others, did the decent acts of every day life that I too often am too busy or too guarded or too cynical to perform. My detective, V I, acts out of a sense of noticeable outrage, but the person she's most often outraged with is me, not some anonymous member of the larger world. I've always been afraid that when the chips were down I would be a collaborator, not a resister.

And that brings me to these times. Last week, the Supremes let stand a lower court ruling that allows the San Diego welfare department to break into the homes of welfare recipients without a warrant to make sure they're not committing fraud. This is not a violation of the 4th Amendment for some reason that I don't understand. I wish I could believe they would break into the home of Dick Cheney's friends and former co-workers, who have been living on government welfare for 7 years, enriching themselves at our expense, but of course that will never happen.

I guess what I want to know is, where is the outrage? Where is the outrage when the Supremes announced that women's health is irrelevant to questions about abortion? Where is the outrage about the many thousands of American dead in Iraq, the many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died, the millions of Iraqis who have become refugees, the forty or fifty thousand Americans maimed for life? Where is the outrage over the cost of this unjust and pernicious war, now at $1.6 trillion, and likely to be doubled that--in a country which can't afford health care, public transit, or good schools?

I would like to be the person heroic enough, moral enough, to take action, but all I do is grumble and go Christmas shopping. No wonder V I is outraged with me.

Sara Paretsky