Red Lake Minnesota

The story was there in the white pine forests of Northern Minnesota before March 21st.

Before Jeff Weise shot and killed his grandfather and 8 other people at Red Lake High School around 3:00 PM Monday, there was a story...it was about a community of about 5,000 souls with an unemployment rate estimated to be as high as 65 percent, a high school graduation rate near 60% and 40% of families living below the Federal Poverty Guidelines.

Few of us knew or cared until people died. It took children’s blood on the floor to attract the press piranhas who have descended on that small community of 5,000 as they scramble for 30 second film clips and sound bites that will be the core of their coverage of the deaths in the remote and reclusive Red Lake community. Certainly, unemployment numbers, poverty levels and drop out rates will be squeezed into the reports but they are numbers you and I would never see if people had not died.

Long after the 3 day wakes are over, long after the grass has started to grow again on new graves, those numerical signs of our failure as a nation to care about the well being of all, will still be there. A year from now, will we even remember what the term “Red Lake” means? Columbine is frozen in our minds, maybe even the stand off at Wounded Knee but what will become of “Red Lake”? Will we remember the unemployment and the people living below the federal poverty level there in Red Lake?

Astonishingly, the Oval Office has thus far been silent on the Red Lake tragedy. I wonder if that silence has something to do with the Administration’s proposed 2006 budget which includes $100,000,000 in cuts for Indian programs including health and education. The sincerity of a hand held out in consolation is a tough sell when the other hand is cutting money from programs designed to help the very people being consoled.

Maybe I just don’t understand what “compassionate conservatism” really means. Is it code for something else?