Here's another angle from The Mudflats: Rural Alaska in Crisis: The Real Tragedy of Troopergate (Funny how everything is so neatly tied together.)
We’ve all been listening to Sarah Palin for the last couple days saying things like “Both the lieutenant governor and I have offered to fly out there and see what we can do personally.” And then we hear Nick Turner, the local resident whose letter and cry for help, resulted in the current media firestorm about the lack of preparation that led rural villages across the state to their current state of desperation.
“I wish I could take Gov. (Sarah) Palin and walk her around in the houses here,” he said.
Palin spokeswoman Sharon Leighow said the governor is monitoring the scene in Emmonak but, for now, has no plans to travel to the area.
So despite her offers to fly out there and help personally, as long as it means she doesn’t actually have to do it, her staff is all bent out of shape at the accusations that she doesn’t care. Because she does care. Really.
The head of the Division of Community and Regional Affairs said she is
troubled by media coverage that Gov. Sarah Palin is sitting idle despite the cry for help in the Lower Yukon River village of 800. Palin has been very engaged in mobilizing staff and has orchestrated the response, Jollie said. “It’s a priority for her,” she said. “She’s been asking for updates and information, all week as matter of fact.”
Caring doesn’t fuel the fire, and caring doesn’t feed the belly. What this state needed was a leader who was thinking ahead, able to comprehend the impending crisis, rallying the troops and the state government to use creative solutions to keep this from happening. This was not a last minute problem. This didn’t just happen out of the blue. The Palin administration cannot claim, with any sense of veracity, that they didn’t know this was coming.
Now, let’s play a little game. I call it: Name That State Employee.
Let’s just suppose for the sake of our game, that we can turn the clock back, and the date is….oh….July 12, 2008, six weeks before Palin’s VP nomination. On that day, one of the state’s commissioners wrote a letter to the governor’s office, fellow commissioners, and state leaders including Attorney General Talis Colberg who now heads up the Governor’s new Rural Subcabinet. Here’s an excerpt:
Given the gathering storm of a questionable fishing season, and the escalating price of fuel in our state, there will be serious stress placed upon communities and residents who will struggle with the coming winter’s challenges. Last week I had asked our Troopers and Fire Marshalls to outreach both to these communities, and to your departments in a cooperative effort to mitigate issues that will arise like: theft, domestic violence, substance abuse, suicide; and, accidental death that all can come from sinking reserves of fuel, money and hope. Teamwork will never be so important.
Just let that sink in for a moment. Here’s someone who, in the first week of July, had already called for community outreach to prevent the situation that is happening now from happening in the first place. JULY. Whoever this commissioner is, he obviously knows what he’s doing. He obviously has vision and is able to look past his own nose, and see the storm coming. Here’s someone who cares deeply about the people who are in the path of the oncoming train, and has the desire and ability to help ahead of time. And what, if you were governor, might you want to do with someone like this? If you were Sarah Palin, you’d fire him.
That’s right, the commissioner in question was Walt Monegan, and the excerpt you read was from a letter he sent announcing that he had been replaced, and urging those with the power to do so to keep the crisis in rural Alaska from happening. He no longer had a job, but as he wrote this letter, he was still able to have a broader perspective, and leave with a parting request that these issues be handled properly, for the sake of these people, his fellow Alaskans on whom the storm was about to descend.
And that, my friends, is the real tragedy of Troopergate. Sarah Palin’s personal agenda, and the consuming need to get rid of a commissioner who wouldn’t and couldn’t legally fire someone she didn’t like, has brought down suffering on thousands of innocent people in this state. The fact that legislators may refuse to even issue a statement saying that the governor was wrong in firing Walt Monegan, means that this can happen again. It means that our elected representatives are turning a blind eye to the mechanism that removed this person from his office; a competent and effective leader who would have helped to curb the effects of this crisis. They are allowing middle school politics to affect matters of (literally) life and death.
So, whether or not Governor Palin flies out to Emmonak, and whether or not she ever decides to actually issue a statement on this tragedy, which she has yet to do, the fact remains that if she really cared, she would have been thinking about these people last July, like Walt Monegan was.
I asked Walt Monegan if he wanted to comment on the situation in Emmonak, and other rural communities. Here’s what he told me.
‘Standing amidst disaster is not the time for blame, it is a time for action. Mr. Tucker’s letter was a call to arms, and everyone who can should help our fellow Alaskans. Let’s get our neighbors out of danger now and work collectively to ensure that no Alaskan ever has to face such dire choices again.’
Mr. Monegan is a gracious man. And while I agree wholeheartedly that this is the time for action, and I celebrate the action that has come from this community and others, we also need to remember when it comes time to vote for elected officials, who was paying attention and who was not.
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