A moment, please, to remember

[Atticus]

my best friend's two brothers, a cousin and I drove to Gulfport just after the storm ended to help get the trees off my friend's house and clean up debris. These are just a random sample of many pics and movies I took...

 

 

 

 

 

[Good Old Neon]

I would never blame Bush, or anyone for that matter, for the hurricane itself

[anodyne]

I would love to know what countries were "offering" help and what type of help.

for one, cuba was offering to send in rescue workers and supply MUCH NEEDED rescue boats. katrina went over cuba as well, not one single person was killed.

[bjorn_skurj]

I have a pretty clear recollection of Mexico offering clean drinking water.

[anodyne]

President Bush's Anti-Black Hurricane Maker wasn't fully operational until 2 months after the hurricane hit.

 

As for blaming Bush for the aftermath, not much he could've done. It was such a beauracratic mess, so much red tape. If you want to blame anything, blame the system.

if you're going to quote what i said, please keep the context of the entire sentence simply because the point was relevant. the reason that hurricane was so devastating was nothing slowed it down before it hit the mainland (such as wetlands -- a natural barrier that has been destroyed by our environmental policies under the last few presidents). these abnormally powerful natural disasters have a cause, and it's not angry gods. it's irresponsible resource management.

 

 

the red tape is in place DIRECTLY BY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION!! remember hurricane andrew? FEMA (which wasn't stacked with cronies) responded quickly and fairly efficiently. The so-called red tape was bumbling and incompetent navigation of the channels of government. Also, there was a very real move to privatize as much of the relief as possible (naomi klein wrote a great article about this). in blaming the system, you are in fact blaming the bush administration. they moved fema to DHS and staffed it with non-professionals who couldn't find their asses with both hands and a mirror. that is the system.

 

while i liked the underdog cartoons possibly more than the next guy, i wouldn't confuse bush with simon bar sinister, although i'd not vote for either of them for county dog catcher.

[Gobias Industries]

You should go. I'll pitch in for the one way ticket.

 

The only thing I'm scared about is the lack of proper dentistry in Britain...

[W(TF)]

..levees were not built to withstand a sizable hurricane, a historic lapse of judgment and competence topped only by this: The levees are still not ready for the next serious storm.

 

This is probably the saddest part, to me. Watching Spike Lee's doc brought it home; those levees 'protect' poor black communities (mostly), and nobody gives a shit.

 

NO is a great city that we should never forget about.

[EL the Famous]

i'm jsut going to say NO is a fantastic city and this whole thing was and is still painful to watch. and that i'm a huge shuck owens fan.

[quarter23cd]

Ok, in hindsight, I apologize for bringing Bush into this with that stupid photo. Another reminder that countering sarcasm with sarcasm really doesn't further the discussion. Duly noted.

 

The events in New Orleans were certainly the most gigantic clusterfuck of incompetence that I have seen in my lifetime. Even moreso than 9/11 (to me, at least), it seemed as if it shook our collective sense of security and challenged a lot of the assumptions we make about the structure and resilience of our society as a whole. This time there was no scary bogeyman to distract us from the reality that, weather fluctuations aside, the scope of this disaster was largely our own damn fault. The point of the article, as I saw it, wasn't to lay blame at anybody's feet, but to serve as a reminder of many of the factors that contributed to this disaster--issues that by no means are isolated to New Orleans and certainly have not been magically "solved" anywhere in its aftermath. If ever there was an event that invited serious introspection and self-criticism, this is it. I don't see why that is a bad thing or how it amounts to "hating" the country.

[Mrs. Peel]

I will never forget listening to NPR 4 days after Katrina, and close to 48 hours after I began hearing and seeing reports all over the news from the Convention Center. The NPR host, Robert Seigel, was interviewing Chertoff, asking why all these people were in the Convention Center without food or water in deplorable conditions and no one was helping them. Chertoff responded that he had no reports of people being in the Convention Center. I could almost see the steam coming out of Seigel's ears. Immediately following his phone interview, a very angry journalist phoned to say that he was AT the Convention Center and had been reporting on it for the last day as every other news agency had been. Right after his call ended, Seigel said (paraphrasing) "Michael Chertoff's office has just called back to say that they now have reports of people at the Convention Center and will be sending supplies."

 

THAT is a catastrophic failure on the part of the US government to help its people. There was zero excuse for them to not be aware of the situation.

 

I saw archival footage last night of the convoy of those huge military trucks driving through the water in a line toward the Convention Center after Chertoff was "made aware of the situation" and I still got the same feeling of internally jumping for joy as I did when I watched it live two years ago.

 

Timeline

[Tweedling]

for one, cuba was offering to send in rescue workers and supply MUCH NEEDED rescue boats. katrina went over cuba as well, not one single person was killed.

I doubt anyone would have died had the levees not failed. As far as cuba is concerned, I'm sure the citizens would like some help from that government first. Do you think the hurricane was the same category over cuba as it was when it hit NO?

[ShuckOwens]

i'm jsut going to say NO is a fantastic city and this whole thing was and is still painful to watch. and that i'm a huge shuck owens fan.

Hey... I have feelings, too.

[jcroach]

James Howard Kunstler has written a couple of great ,but shrill books on the state of America to come....

-Robert.

 

I've met Kunstler. He's kind of a douchebag. That being said...................................

 

 

Its pretty rough down there, everything you hear is true. There is a lot of good happening too. Go down and see for yourself. If you want to volunteer your time, that is fantastic, the city needs it.

 

I echo these remarks. I spent a week in March hanging drywall and insulation in the Upper 9th Ward. I hope to go back in December and do more. The people there are great and very appreciative of the volunteers from across the country that have come to help rebuild.

 

If you do go to New Orleans, take time to get outside of the French Quarter and tourist areas and talk to the real people who's live have been forever changes by the storm and flooding. Drive through the Lower 9th Ward or the areas downriver of the 17th Street canal. It's shocking and eye opening. I was there more than a year after the storm and most of the debris had been removed from the streets and the water had been pumped away. On the surface, things looked ok, until you realizes that the stores were all closed and the hospitals were boarded up and there were block after block of dark houses and apartment complexs. Seeing the National Guard in Humvees patrolling the Lowes and Home Depot was also a shocker.

[John Smith]

Huh? It's a commentary, not a report. Calm down.

I remember the gigantic clusterfuck that was this board in the days following the hurricane hitting and I remember being one of like 3 people that didn't see this as yet another opportunity to jump on Bush. I still feel that way. It wasn't his fault the beauracracy kept anyuone from getting anything done. If Kerry had been in office, the same damn thing would've happened. There are thousands of other things to bitch about with Bush, pick one with an actual basis in reality.

 

As someone who has lived in South Florida all their life, I know all too well the damage hurricanes can cause. People were still recovering from Andrew up until a few years ago. Watching Katrina head to New Orleans was pretty frightening, I remember we were in AP US HIstory and we put the news on to watch the reports on the Superdome. Frightening, frightening stuff, especially for anyone who's ever had their house destroyed by a hurricane, like me.

 

The Year before katrina (An election year) FEMA worked spectacularly after a Hurricane (or was it three in succession?) in Florida (a battleground state).

 

 

I would love to know what countries were "offering" help and what type of help.

I believe France had two or three water purification ships in the regions that were offered within a day or so of katrina. I also think for some reason that offer was turned down.

[anodyne]

I doubt anyone would have died had the levees not failed. As far as cuba is concerned, I'm sure the citizens would like some help from that government first. Do you think the hurricane was the same category over cuba as it was when it hit NO?

the levees failing is our government failing, not the natural disaster. this also goes back to the whacked priorities of the bush administration. tax cuts in a time of war and we expect things to function?

[caliber66]

Has anyone brought up the fact that it's not the government's fault (this administration's anyway ) that the people of New Orleans built their city in a giant bowl beside an even more giant body of water that is subject to the occasional tropical storm blowing through?

[Gobias Industries]

Has anyone brought up the fact that it's not the government's fault (this administration's anyway ) that the people of New Orleans built their city in a giant bowl beside an even more giant body of water that is subject to the occasional tropical storm blowing through?

 

DAMN THE TECTONIC PLATES

[Tweedling]

the levees failing is our government failing, not the natural disaster. this also goes back to the whacked priorities of the bush administration. tax cuts in a time of war and we expect things to function?

Those damn tax cuts! If only we had a tax increase the levees may have stayed together?

 

Most of the levees were built in the 20's (if I'm not mistaken)

 

I agree things were not handled as well as they should have, but come on!

[ShuckOwens]

My one and only trip to New Orleans was in '95 to visit a buddy of mine... a buddy of mine whose front door vista was an eye-level view of cargo ships chugging to and fro.

 

The not-so-old adage of: "If you live at the base of a volcano, keep a good pair of running shoes near the door" came to mind at the time.

 

There really is no excuse for state & federal mishandling of rescue & relief efforts... especially for people who can not help themselves. However, there is also no excuse for a "Hey, bail my ass out of trouble" attitude from people who do not heed storm warnings, and intend to ride out the trouble. How many of us know that there may be a point in our lives that our personal well-being may lie in our own hands for days... even weeks after a natural disaster? I live in a remote part of the country where a blizzard cold bury me in 10 feet of snow in 24 hours. I keep a generator tuned up during the winter, a good supply of firewood... and make damn sure there is enough non perishible food and drinking water to last for weeks on end. It's no fun... but it's part of the deal living how and where I want to live. From 1800's vintage dams in New England (I grew up near a few in Peterborough, NH... no one gave a thought to the rickety relics then) just waiting for that next big storm, to shaky ground in the Bay area... I simply can not be the only Wilco fan who values a healthy self-preservation instinct, and enough concern for my loved ones to make sure they possess it as well.

 

Some people are more concerned with scoring political points immediately following natural disasters. They are called: "douche bags". If you live a sheltered "it won't happen to me" life... I guess you can call them "heroes".

 

What do I know? I voted for George Bush twice. Back to trolling.

[bjorn_skurj]

A lot of people in NO didn't have the means to leave the city on their own. And dammit, those levees should have been bigger and better maintained. Nobody likes paying taxes, but if you want to have a nice country, it costs money. There is no aphorism more true than "you get what you pay for." Perhaps if Bush, along with the rest of us, had taken a more rational attitude toward what it really takes, money wise, to run this nation in a responsible manner, which means fixing things before they catastrophically fail, lives could have been saved.

[Gobias Industries]

You also have to understand that people who grew up there are less likely to just pack their bags and move out. That's the only place they've known, and they'll be damned if a storm tries to kick them out of the only home they've ever known. Every outsider to NO probably would just consider it another patch of land. But if you're from New Orleans, it's much more than just a patch of land doomed to suffer from storms. It's a culture, it's a legitimately living and breathing thing. You're considerably less inclined to leave when you leave your entire past - going past the jazz club, for example - personally, if I were from New Orleans, I would hate to leave that music scene.

 

It's that Hoover-ian attitude that damns these emotionally attached people - and I, for one, fed up with it. Not everyone is capable of "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" and moving out to an entirely new place. It's just not in some people's blood. And that's where the government should step in - and where it has obviously failed.

 

I remember reading about this: those who are attached to a place are of the "weak," those who are attached to all places are considered "fairly strong," and those attached to no place are considered the "strongest." Is this Albert Camus? I don't remember, I'll have to look it up...

 

edit: this isn't what I was looking for, but it's something that relates to my first point...it's from Epiphany IV? Rom 13:1-7 and Matt. 8:1-13...I have no idea what this whole Bible blabber is so here's the url:

http://anglicancontinuum.blogspot.com/2007...phany-2007.html

 

Indeed, it is very cruel. I think of a lady I knew for years, a saintly matriarch of a large family in Catonsville, Maryland, forced to choose between the place that for more than eighty years had been for her the house of God, where all her family including her husband were buried, and the truth. That old church, with its stained glass, its walls covered with angels, its marble altar where the sacrament had been consecrated perhaps as many as a million times, had been her spiritual home, a bit of heaven on earth. Maybe some people would think of it as unworthy or carnal to be so attached to one place. But, I do not think so; people do have sentiments and deep feelings, affections for their memories, and attachments to the holiness of sacred space.

 

ps I recall the name of Hugo that has to deal with what I'm looking for, anyone have any idea?

pps I feel extremely awkward quoting from an Anglican blogsite...

[Chendizzle]

Some people are more concerned with scoring political points immediately following natural disasters. They are called: "douche bags". If you live a sheltered "it won't happen to me" life... I guess you can call them "heroes".

 

What do I know? I voted for George Bush twice. Back to trolling.

 

 

Most people weren't concerned with scoring political points, they were just calling out FEMA/the govt for the bullshit job they did. But if that makes them douchebags then sure dude. What do you know though, you voted for Bush...twice.

[mountain bed]

A lot of people in NO didn't have the means to leave the city on their own. And dammit, those levees should have been bigger and better maintained. Nobody likes paying taxes, but if you want to have a nice country, it costs money. There is no aphorism more true than "you get what you pay for." Perhaps if Bush, along with the rest of us, had taken a more rational attitude toward what it really takes, money wise, to run this nation in a responsible manner, which means fixing things before they catastrophically fail, lives could have been saved.

Dan that's so on the money. I've never had any qualms about paying taxes if I could be assured that the $$$ were going to health, education, welfare etc. It's not just some cliche' that 'the greatness of a nation is determined by how they treat the least fortunate'.

 

More than any other event on the domestic front in the past 2 years Katrina has been a disaster for the Republican Party because it has fanned the flames of the old adage that "Republicans don't care about the people" (whether that's true or not).

[kidsmoke]

Poor Translator, I was moved by what you wrote.

 

You too, Chendizzle, Mt. Bed, and of course Dan.

[ShuckOwens]

Most people weren't concerned with scoring political points, they were just calling out FEMA/the govt for the bullshit job they did. But if that makes them douchebags then sure dude. What do you know though, you voted for Bush...twice.

Those words moved me... "dude".

 

People who were concerned with laying blame only in the most politically expedient places (in the case of the Katrina response... letting the local officials off the hook entirely) were beyond contempt. But it was not surprising. Someday the sun will go supernova, and swallow the Earth. This, too will be George Bush's fault.

 

Dude.