I agree with these statements and couldn’t word them any better, so here is a quote from Something Awful:
Rich, myself, Livestock, and probably some of the other writers have been watching the hurricane aftermath with nothing short of dumb shock. There is a disaster going on right now and it is manmade. The disaster is three strangers in Mississippi, together because they’re all that’s left and alone in a town without buildings, drinking floodwater polluted by corpses, shit and gasoline. The disaster is a woman wading through waist deep streets holding her daughter and wondering why the trucks won’t stop to get her out of the city. The disaster is ICU patients dying one after another because diesel didn’t flow and order couldn’t be kept. It’s an uninterrupted chain of personal disasters. It’s inept triage on a national scale. It’s unbelievable that this is America.
It’s hard to comprehend that these repeating images of herds of people without food or water or medical treatment after nearly a week are happening on our soil. They’re our fellow citizens and while the politicians, directors, planners and generals congratulate each other at press conferences they are suffering and dying. I have seen some efforts in the media to pressure officials to accept responsibility. None have, because in public office the buck stops nowhere. The only person I have really seen come close to capturing the raw fury of the people trapped in New Orleans or forgotten in Mississippi and Alabama is CNN’s Anderson Cooper. He confronted Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu on live TV, chiding her with a voice cracking with emotion that he couldn’t believe the politicians were patting each other on the back over a job well done when he just saw rats eating a woman’s body in the street of Biloxi. On the Internet I’ve seen people blatantly placing blame on Bush, FEMA, Congress, the National Guard, and even Homeland Security.
Who is responsible? Who should be blamed? All of them. This is a colossal failure of our government to care for and protect its citizenry on every conceivable level. The heroes are the men and women on the scene doing their utmost to help those in need. Coast Guard rescue workers plucking people to safety and Red Cross workers feeding people from emergency kitchens are heroes. The man who commandeered a bus and got people out of New Orleans when the government was woefully impotent is a hero. The woman who smashed the glass on a convenience store to loot bottled water for fifteen kids who should have been absolutely inundated with supplies by then is a hero. The doctors and nurses hand-bagging ventilator patients 24 hours a day in dark hospitals are heroes. In the ineloquent but true words of the Mayor of New Orleans: “Don’t tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They’re not here. It’s too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.” CNN was better prepared to deal with this disaster than FEMA was.
I am ashamed of my country’s government in a universal way right now. Republicans, democrats, opportunists, it doesn’t matter; they’re all guilty in this situation. In a magical world where justice is actually served most of these people would not have jobs in a month or two. Instead the people without jobs will be the millions who have lost everything and found their government with its back turned. Remember that people are still dying because of this incompetence. Remember that when each and every one of these fools appears on TV for a photo op or complains about “placing blame later,” because placing blame now is the only hope America has to change the situation.
New Orleans crisis shames Americans
At the end of an unforgettable week, one broadcaster on Friday bitterly encapsulated the sense of burning shame and anger that many American citizens are feeling.
The only difference between the chaos of New Orleans and a Third World disaster operation, he said, was that a foreign dictator would have responded better.
It has been a profoundly shocking experience for many across this vast country who, for the large part, believe the home-spun myth about the invulnerability of the American Dream.
The party in power in Washington is always happy to convey the impression of 50 states moving forward together in social and economic harmony towards a bigger and better America.
That is what presidential campaigning is all about.
But what the devastating consequences of Katrina have shown — along with the response to it — is that for too long now, the fabric of this complex and overstretched country, especially in states like Louisiana and Mississippi, has been neglected and ignored.
Borrowed time
The fitting metaphors relating to the New Orleans debacle are almost too numerous to mention.
First there was an extraordinary complacency, mixed together with what seemed like over-reaction, before the storm.
A genuinely heroic mayor orders a total evacuation of the city the day before Katrina arrives, knowing that for decades now, New Orleans has been living on borrowed time.
The National Guard and federal emergency personnel stay tucked up at home.
The havoc of Katrina had been predicted countless times on a local and federal level — even to the point where it was acknowledged that tens of thousands of the poorest residents would not be able to leave the city in advance.
No official plan was ever put in place for them.
Abandoned to the elements
The famous levees that were breached could have been strengthened and raised at what now seems like a trifling cost of a few billion dollars.
The Bush administration, together with Congress, cut the budgets for flood protection and army engineers, while local politicians failed to generate any enthusiasm for local tax increases.
New Orleans partied-on just hoping for the best, abandoned by anyone in national authority who could have put the money into really protecting the city.
Meanwhile, the poorest were similarly abandoned, as the horrifying images and stories from the Superdome and Convention Center prove.
The truth was simple and apparent to all. If journalists were there with cameras beaming the suffering live across America, where were the officers and troops?
The neglect that meant it took five days to get water, food, and medical care to thousands of mainly orderly African-American citizens desperately sheltering in huge downtown buildings of their native city, has been going on historically, for as long as the inadequate levees have been there.
Divided city
I should make a confession at this point: I have been to New Orleans on assignment three times in as many years, and I was smitten by the Big Easy, with its unique charms and temperament.
But behind the elegant intoxicants of the French Quarter, it was clearly a city grotesquely divided on several levels. It has twice the national average poverty rate.
The government approach to such deprivation looked more like thoughtless containment than anything else.
The nightly shootings and drugs-related homicides of recent years pointed to a small but vicious culture of largely black-on-black crime that everyone knew existed, but no-one seemed to have any real answers for.
Again, no-one wanted to pick up the bill or deal with the realities of race relations in the 21st Century.
Too often in the so-called “New South”, they still look positively 19th Century.
“Shoot the looters” is good rhetoric, but no lasting solution.
Uneasy paradox
It is astonishing to me that so many Americans seem shocked by the existence of such concentrated poverty and social neglect in their own country.
In the workout room of the condo where I am currently staying in the affluent LA neighbourhood of Santa Monica, an executive and his personal trainer ignored the anguished television reports blaring above their heads on Friday evening.
Either they did not care, or it was somehow too painful to discuss.
When President Bush told “Good Morning America” on Thursday morning that nobody could have “anticipated” the breach of the New Orleans levees, it pointed to not only a remote leader in denial, but a whole political class.
The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country — of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society — has reached a crisis point this week.
Will there be real investment, or just more buck-passing between federal agencies and states?
The country has to choose whether it wants to rebuild the levees and destroyed communities, with no expense spared for the future — or once again brush off that responsibility, and blame the other guy.
Digg This
Delicious
Facebook
Stumbleupon
Comments are closed.