Slate: ‘Bighearted People Helping Hurricane Victims Not America at Its Best’

It’s official: the Left hates America.

8.30.2017

We didn’t need more proof that the unhinged Left hates everything about America, but Slate gave us another piece of evidence anyway with its latest critique of the American spirit that has exploded in Houston.

Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and the like are events that seem to bring us together in a common cause and help us forget our differences if only for a brief moment. Most of us are relishing in that elusive moment, especially at a time when forces are hoping we stay divided. However, Slate believes the heroic responses to Hurricane Harvey doesn’t showcase America at its best and anyone that claims it is is just adding to “national mythmaking.”

Katy Waldman writes in her piece:

The flood, the animals: It all felt so mythic. In coverage of Harvey, the word hero is almost as ubiquitous as the stills of intrepid reporters, their rain slickers swirling like capes, and hunky National Guardsmen in life jackets. During a speech to the press on Monday, President Donald Trump noted that crisis showcases “the best in America’s character—strength, charity, and resilience.”

But does catastrophe illustrate, or does it transform? What if America is less a glorious nation of do-gooders awaiting the chance to exercise their altruism than a moral junior varsity team elevated by circumstance?

The point here is obviously not to diminish the bighearted men and women who rose to the occasion when Harvey, a “once-in-a-lifetime” storm with a spiraling death toll, slammed into Texas. But it is misleading to characterize Houston as an exhibition of the “best of America” when what it represents is a contingent America, a “paradise” specific to the “hell” around it. These waterlogged suburbs have become zones of exemption, where norms hang suspended and something lovelier and more communal has been allowed to flourish in their place.

Yeah, Waldman, we get your “point.” Slate made that clear on Twitter with its promotion of this story, though the outlet tried to soften the blow each time, before flat out changing it: