I would be remise if I didn’t have one entry in my blog on this site concerning the devastation in the Gulf states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and the subsequent response of the US government at the local, state, and federal level.
In the wake of this disaster the mayor (New Orleans), governors and the US President failed to respond in a timely and sufficient manner for approximately four days after the storm.
The insufficient response meant a very weak search and rescue response for the crisis at hand. Many people that may have been rescued died, especially in the city of New Orleans where several levees failed releasing water into the city, which covered a lot of the city in high floodwaters.
People in the city evacuated before the storm to the Superdome in New Orleans and throughout the city then had to survive an ordeal that saw the city of New Orleans deconstruction.
Most of the people stuck in the city of New Orleans without food or water were African-American. About ninety-percent were African-American and predominately poor.
People in the Superdome had to eat, sleep, piss, and defecate all in the same general area creating extremely unhealthy conditions in the Superdome (the Convention Center also was a hell hole but it wasn’t a sanctioned shelter).
As time went by law and order began to collapse and sporadic looting, shooting and raping broke out.
The stagnant water within the city became filthy and filled with oil, gas, garbage, and sewage.
The people stuck in the city did not have food or fresh water and as the days went by things were becoming more and more desperate.
The only thing I can compare the conditions in the Superdome to is the trip across the Atlantic traveled by many slaves in the belly of slave ships (called The Southern Passage).
A group of US citizens basically were forced to live in sub human conditions. In fact the conditions were sub animal because there are many types of beast that wouldn’t eat, sh*t and piss in the same general area as the people in the Superdome were forced to do.
This was definitely a new low for American citizens or people anywhere for that matter. I think even a Ku Klux Klan member or a slave owner of times past would have said, “ Whaaaat!”
Anyway, the whole scene in the major southern US city of New Orleans looked like something you would see in an undeveloped nation.
Things became so bad in New Orleans that people died in the streets and shelters of heat exhaustion, lack of access to medicines for chronic health conditions, no access to workable medical equipment (due to the lack of electricity or not enough fuel to run generators in city hospitals and health centers) for people who needed things like dialysis, and the general stress of the situation (talking about the elderly here).
There have been many statements by politicians and pundits concerning the response of the US government to this national disaster. Many of them have been quite funny. The funniest are the people who say the response was okay. Sure. Right.
Then there are those that try to surgically break the storm and the collapse of the levees down into two distinct incidents as if there were no connection between the storm and collapse of the levees. This group includes such people as the Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff and former President Bill Clinton.
Clinton is playing it too cute and quick with this position. This Rhodes Scholar President is behaving like a Rhodes Ass when he tries to justify the response of local, state, and federal authorities and attempts to break the incident so cleanly into two distinct events.
Another group are those who say everything went fine considering the circumstances and it just takes time to organize a response to such a catastrophic event. Trent Lott and the head of FEMA belong to this group.
You know I think even the secret Klan members of Mississippi who support Lott (who can refer to a town in his state as a “negro town”) should vote his ass out of office for that. Lott believes the response to hurricane Katrina was okay? He may not be a Grand Wizard of the Klan but he is a Wizard from some far off place (maybe Mars) if he believes that.
Some say President Bush is a racist and that is why he allowed the situation in New Orleans to develop. There is racism in America, but I do not think President Bush is a racist.
Many blue bloods like the President are sometime insufficiently aware of the poor (or the middle class for that matter) but I don’t think this is the case for the current President either
In any event this incident with the current President is similar to the Rwanda incident with former President Clinton. The Rwandan incident and the Katrina disaster are similar in that they both involved a large group of suffering people that needed assistance which could have been provided in a timely fashion by the US government, but was not. The linkage of the two incidents has to do with relieving human suffering. The action of the former President was damnable then and the actions of the current President are damnable now.
Although the Rwandan incident and the failure of the US President to help the situation is worse than the neglect of a President to provide timely assistance in a natural disaster I feel worse about the response of the President in this incident. This is probably because I’m an American and never thought that such a state of affairs could exist in the United States.