Success Quote by Michael Chertoff

Bureaucratic logic has a way of sounding like compassion while quietly admitting its own limits. Chertoff's sentence, delivered in the dry cadence of a checklist, performs competence: "Second" signals an ordered mind, a government that is managing variables. But the real work happens in the phrase "obviously don't want". "Obviously" is a rhetorical shield. It preemptively frames disagreement as irrational, smoothing over the fact that in disaster response, the "obvious" is often what gets ignored under political pressure and logistical panic.

The line also exposes the grim pragmatism of post-disaster housing. Mobile homes are treated less as homes than as assets with failure points. The moral claim is displaced by risk management: the goal isn't dignity or stability, it's not losing the unit next time. Even the second-person "you're going to lose" subtly transfers agency and blame. It doesn't say the state will fail to protect people; it says "you" will lose property, as if the coming harm is a natural consequence rather than a preventable policy choice.

Context matters: Chertoff, as a senior homeland security official in the post-Katrina era, is speaking from inside a machine under scrutiny for exactly these failures. The quote reads like an attempt to reassert rational planning in the wake of institutional embarrassment. It also hints at how disaster governance narrows the horizon: people become populations, homes become "mobile homes", and catastrophe becomes a scenario to be budgeted against, not a human rupture to be repaired.