GULFPORT, MISS. -- At a time when people need someone to trust, with environmental disaster lurking just over the horizon, there is no one to trust.

A belated government response to Hurricane Katrina here five years ago shook people's faith in the political establishment. And what little trust was left has taken a half-decade pounding from a political element, now led by Alaska's own former Gov. Sarah Palin, that professes to believe government is inherently bad, thoughtless and generally incompetent.

Here at the edge of the envisioned environmental catastrophe (yet to become a real catastrophe) two weeks after the oil rig Deepwater Horizon blew up, killed 11, sank and left an untapped undersea oil volcano gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the people along the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Florida realize they need government help to confront the wolf at the door. But they seem uncertain as to how to react to this need.

Craig Medred photo

With the oil spill stiff offshore, Gulf of Mexico clean-up efforts were concentrated on make-work projects Tuesday near Gulfport, Miss. The goal, said worker Luis Zepeda, is "too keep busy.'

It doesn't help that the calming voices of the Walter Cronkite-like newscasters of another time are gone, replaced in many cases by the shallow, rumor-filled, un-researched banter of talk radio. New Orleans-based WWL radio, a station that focuses on news and sports, has been all over the spill here, and the station's on-air personalities deserve A+ marks for their honesty. But it can't boost anyone's confidence much to listen to the people who are supposed to know something honestly disclosing they know nothing, and then opening the door to speculation from callers who've "looked things up on the Internet" and then call to warn of new dangers.

This morning the discussion was about chemical dispersants used to break up oil, and how "they don't tell us what is in them." There followed some of that "citizen reporting" from Internet sources about how dispersants remove oxygen from the water, and how all the fish are going to die. It was like an instant replay of the Exxon Valdez 21 years ago where the armchair quarterbacks debating officialdom with a twist.

Dispersants have their downside. No argument there. So do chemotherapy and radiation treatments used to combat cancer. Radiation and chemotherapy can kill you. They can also save your life. They have trade-offs, just like dispersants. Someone has to make a call on their use.

More than two decades ago, the opponents of dispersant use in Prince William Sound at least had to gather enough data to make an argument they could sell to the news purveyors of the day before opening a debilitating public debate. Now, it seems, almost anyone can call talk radio at a blink or go online to start that process almost instantaneously.

It does make one wonder: What might the carnage be like in your average ER if the doctors there every day making difficult, sometimes life-and-death calls had someone standing over their shoulders saying, "Well, wait a minute, I don't know. Let's discuss this a bit."

Palin has built a career on dissing the experts and the intelligentsia, and some on both left and right have helped push, for whatever reason, the idea that there is somehow something dangerous about the smart folk. But sometimes you need the smart folk. And if in a crisis you can't trust the smart folk, whom can you trust?