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• 1   JJ // Sep 10, 2005 at 9:05 am

  It’s more than a bit difficult to sort through all the comments and rumors surrounding the New Orleans aftermath. I think we WILL need to learn from all this, but I don’t think there is any organized conspiracy going on to kill poor blacks.

  1. GW is a dimwit and made stupid moves, such as taking frequent publicized vacations. He should have cut this one short and gone back to Washington and stayed indoors, not in front of cameras. This is not a photo-op. The spin makes people that much more angry. He was dumb to appoint cronies to posts, like the FEMA director, Brown. He delegates too much. His sound bites, off the cuff, appear to be callous and plain ignorant. Is Dan Quayle his speechwriter? People want to know that he will take a leadership role and let qualified people do their jobs. He needs to learn to be apologetic. While this will give fuel to those who want to burn him at the stake (it will PROVE he was WRONG, as if he needs to say it for people to realize that…) he needs to show he is humble and admits his mistakes.

  2. Brown, the FEMA director, could have done more and done it better. A good leader would have taken the declaration by Bush on August 26 and gone into Louisiana to aid in the evacuation. At the least, would have rushed to the aid of New Orleans citizens stranded when the levy did break. The federal response was unacceptably slow. This was a serious of errors made at various levels, but I think about how libs always call the Iraq war an invasion, and I hear people defend the Bush administration by saying that until the Governor of Louisiana “asked” for aid, FEMA couldn’t just go in. Hey, if we can “invade” a foreign sovereign nation, we can invade Louisiana! Weak leadership and incompetence seems to be the main federal problem here. The fact that the FEMA budget was cut, and it was moved from a cabinet level post to beneath Homeland Security was another big problem, pointing to a larger issue of how this administration runs the country poorly.

  3. Local officials didn’t make a big deal of this until too late. If FEMA wasn’t breaking down the gates to get there, they should have yelled louder. BUT, it goes beyond unorganized and incompetent state and local officials, and corrupt politics in New Orleans. The levy system was poor and this has been complained about for many years. It didn’t happen overnight. Money was not directed at fixing these, rearchitecting the levy system or doing something to move people to higher ground in a city that is begging to be destroyed by a natural disaster, or a kid with a pipe bomb. The officials in Louisiana and New Orleans knew there were problems and for a long time have not made protecting the citizens of New Orleans a priority. They have not fought harder to protect the wetlands and environment which is a buffer zone around New Orleans. They fought harder to legalize gambling. Government officials at all levels, and certainly at the local level, put people (many poor) in harms way by not doing enough to protect them. They lived beneath sea level and the clock was ticking. I know that they say a hurricane like this only happens every 200 years, but that is what they told us on the Mississippi about “500 year floods” that came twice in the past decade where I live. We talk out of our asses, and when it’s convenient to ignore the problem and spend money on something else that makes voters happy, we do it. Voters are complicit too. They don’t vote for the person that protects them, they vote for the person who makes their life easier NOW. Only AFTER a disaster do they think it would have been good in hindsight to have tax money go to fixing levies, or preparing better for disasters.

  4. The people of New Orleans who “chose” not to leave when they could, put other people at risk. Some needed assistance, and there were some busses taking people out of the area, but a LARGE number of people decided to sit this storm out because they didn’t believe it would be that bad. That was plain stupid. If there was a possible F4 or F5 hurricane coming, I’d have been walking and in 24 hours could have easily walked North of the city and out of harms way. (I don’t know where I’d go after that.)

  LET ME SAY THAT MOST OF THE COUNTRY IS NOT RACIST, AND DOES NOT REDUCE THIS TO A BLACK/WHITE ISSUE. People who want to place blame like to think the reason behind a slow response is that people at the top (as George Carlin calls them “The Owners”) consciously or unconsciously have a bias against poor black people and don’t care for their well-being. That’s a load of crap. When people are looting stores, MOST people understand that it is overwhelmingly for food and water, and not for stereos. The MEDIA likes to sensationalize matters by finding those gangs stealing televisions, or spreading rumors of rapists and organized crime. That shit happens, but not on the large scale that it appears on CNN. Most of the people fucked up because they didn’t leave when they should have, or couldn’t leave for whatever reason. They are trying to rescue their families, pets (yes, people care about their pets), MOST people know they are just good people in a bad situation and feel compassion for them.

  5. Nature is to blame, too. We cannot ever fully stop nature, and right now our science is not sophisticated enough to allow us to predict the details of a storm, or foretell an earthquake (let alone the rouge human factor, i.e. “terrorists” or kids with pipe bombs.) We need to spend the bucks to improve our ability to predict. We also need to spend money to be prepared and have a better aware and trained citizenry. There WILL be major natural disasters in this and other countries in the coming decades and centuries that will make the past century look like a walk in the park. We KNOW the track record of the Earth. There have been huge hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, climate shifts, super-volcanoes, droughts, magnetic pole shifts, solar storms, huge deposits of nitrogen released into the atmosphere from undersea, asteroids and comets that have struck the planet. Life on this planet is fragile and has been nearly wiped out on several occasions. How will we respond when the New Madrid fault quakes, and destroys St. Louis? Or when the Yellowstone volcano erupts? Or as the ocean levels slowly rise due to climate changes? Look at the past 300 Million years of history on Earth, since the continents started to drift, and tell me that the Earth has been a stable place to live. As far as the Earth is concerned, a 300 year old city like New Orleans is a newborn baby. We need to have a larger perspective in order to be better prepared.

  I don’t have solutions, but I also think there is a lot of blame to share, from the top down. Maybe we need to pay a little more in taxes for a few years only (because I do not think taxes should go up and up and be more of a burden and stifle the economy or our ability to save, unless there is a damn good reason) in order to get beyond the cost of the war and disasters and become a little more prepared for the inevitable. Maybe we need to stop being individually selfish, and realize that we are in a world with several billion other people, and we have to have more of a sense of community and care for our fellow man, whether they are in our town, or our race or speak our language, or not. We could all care more, and give more, because ignoring the truth and believing that disasters only happen to the other guy is damn ignorant. We can’t bury out heads in the sand and ignore difficult problems just because they aren’t in our community, or on our street. Maybe we need to stop taking photo-ops and saying stupid stuff and instead just be seen rolling up our sleeves (or putting on HAZMAT suits and wading into rivers of sewage). After all, actions speak louder than words. I have a friend who says we all need to “Walk our talk.” And, I agree.

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