fivecats | Katrina and the Waves: Some Scattered Thoughts from the Week (Reply)

Dark Clouds
August 2005 Raleigh, NC

I feel the love,I feel the love, I feel the love that's really real
I feel the love, I feel the love, I feel the love that's really real

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I've spent much of the last week trying to wrap my mind around my world in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the breech of the seawalls surrounding New Orleans. There has been a lot to take in, most of it extremely negative and very difficult to deal with. Here's a sampling:

* I was amazed at how thin the veil of civility truly is and how quickly it was thrown off when the structures of society broke down. Yes, I know there were plenty of stories of people coming together to help one another out, but the stories of cruelty and inhumanity have simply overwhelmed me. Hard to believe this is America? Not really. I'm just amazed at how quickly it all happened.

* Kanye West summed it up pretty well during Friday night's Concert for Hurrincane Relief when he said "George Bush doesn't care about black people." (It was edited out of the West Coast re-broadcast)

Bob Shieffer ended Sunday's "Face the Nation" with a "personal note":

"We have come through what may have been one of the worst weeks in America's history, a week in which government at every level failed the people it was created to serve. There is no purpose for government except to improve the lives of its citizens. Yet as scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality. As the floodwaters rose, local officials in New Orleans ordered the city evacuated. They might as well have told their citizens to fly to the moon. How do you evacuate when you don't have a car? No hint of intelligent design in any of this. This was just survival of the richest."

Even Fox "News" reporters are having a hard time toeing the party line. Both Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith refused to let Sean Hannity spin the people and the events they were witnessing.

* I'm not foolish enough to believe that any one person had a magic wand and could make things All Better for the people down there in those first days after the seawalls broke. I do believe, however, that other things could have been done and should have been done. This buck starts somewhere and has to end somewhere. I don't care who was in office, what party, what gender, what race, what name -- it's the President's job to defend this nation and to protect it's people. This was a collossal failure in that regard and people are still dying as a result.

* We have the largest in-country refugee problem the country has ever faced. We have hundreds of thousands of people with no place to live, no jobs to go to who know their displaced and, as tax revenues start getting tight, they'll undoubtedly know that they're unwanted wherever they've been placed. This problem is not going to be going away for years and someone in the federal government better get used to the fact that they're going to have to be taking care of a lot of angry, scared non-tax paying people for a before until the situation gets better. It's going to call for new ways of looking at the problem and new solutions.

* I understand those that say we must rebuild New Orleans. What I don't understand is how.
Brush aside the money to rebuild issue for the moment (and don't tell me anyone is going to rebuild New Orleans with the low rent government subsidized housing that was there previously). Let's just look at the Environmental Impact for a moment. The waters that swept through New Orleans were polluted enough already without the additions of all of the petrochemicals that have mixed in from all of the cars, above-ground gasoline tanks and home heating tanks. Then consider what the average home has inside for simple household cleaning agents. How many toxins are there? Have any paint lying around? How about turpentine? Acetone?

Once they get all of the dead removed from the city -- requiring a building-by-building, room-by-room search -- and as much of the water pumped out as possible, they're still going to have to deal with the mud and silt left behind. That silt will be a toxic soup of staggering perportions. The ground? Just as bad if not worse. How do you rebulid on ground that isn't safe to walk on without shoes and where you need face masks to protect your breathing?

I believe that in our lifetime we have seen the destruction of a major America city.

(I would be happy to be proven wrong, I'm just not sure how that would happen.)

Meanwhile, we'll return to our regularly scheduled blogging in the coming days.

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