It has been nearly a month since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.

For too many Americans, the concern lies not with assisting displaced persons or rebuilding an entire region of the country, but with asking who is to blame for the response to the disaster.

Hundreds of people lie dead, a major city lies in ruins and hundreds of thousands of already disadvantaged Americans have lost everything.

With that said, many people choose not to devote time and effort toward assisting the unprecedented relief effort, but toward the political arena – were President Bush and FEMA to blame or the local officials?

Only in modern-day America, where political divides seemingly are at their worst in a long time, can the most horrific natural disaster to strike our nation in modern times become a political issue.

This columnist, for one, is sick of it.

If one looks at the mistakes made before and after the hurricane, it is fairly straightforward to see what went wrong. The local government failed greatly in evacuating the citizens most vulnerable to the effects of the hurricane, and the federal government failed greatly in keeping the order in post-hurricane New Orleans, while also doing a terrible job in getting those left behind in the city out.

In other words, neither side is fully responsible but both are to blame. Yet it seems the only thing political pundits care about is posturing to make the other side look bad and making Washington, D.C. seem like the area most affected by the storm.

For this, I have one statement to say to these people – right now, politics is the last thing on the victims’ minds. Do partisan tirades on CNN or Fox News mean anything to a homeless family living on cots in the Astrodome?

Being critical of government officials is not a negative thing but being irrational about it is. The news media did a good thing when it revealed the terrible ineptitude shown by FEMA, which resulted in the resignation of someone who should never have been there in the first place. It also has led to positive reform within the organization.

But after FEMA, there is little relevant blame you can put on other government officials. Should George Bush have waited three days to stop his vacation and say something about the worst disaster to strike the nation in recent memory? No.

Should New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin continue to blast federal officials about post-disaster response when he had a lackluster pre-disaster response? No.

But even had Bush left Crawford early, and even if Nagin had pleaded for people to leave earlier, Katrina still would have struck and thousands would still have died.

Now, thanks to this continued political fight, instead of focusing on relief efforts and discussing options to rebuilding, people are giving airtime to and debating bizarre and ridiculous theories, such as the “Bush was directly responsible because of global warming” and “God punished New Orleans because they deserved it” theories. Nobody seems to remember the good old days, when natural disasters could be blamed on nature.

We cannot continue to let our country go down a polarizing political path. We already have reached the point where liberals and conservatives are taking heat for wind damage and flooding.

What’s next – voting against the governor because there were too many tornadoes in the state this year?

Yes, even in this country, sometimes politics isn’t tied to everything.

Those who insist on making this tragedy a hot-button issue can keep on doing so; for the rest of us, we can do something to make this tragedy end as soon as possible and start looking toward the next time we are going to need to devote our services and attention.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.