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2:26:00 PM PDT
freeing the rant within
Photo by Eric Gay for the Star Tribune
I spent all day Friday, like so many others, in a state of shock and information overload. CNN played on for a full 24 hour cycle in the den: local news networks held sway in the kitchen and NPR ruled the guest room where I sat at the computer reading web pages, news blogs and personal journals for hours at a time.
It proved to be too much for my enfeebled brain, and in the end I wound up feeling quite as certifiable as the authors of a few blogs I encountered in my obsessive quest for comprehension. This temporary madness may have led me to leave a few overwrought comments in journals, and if yours was one of them, …um…I’m sorry. All I can say is just be grateful that AOL, in its infinite wisdom, does not allow font options on comment input or you’d have been subjected to despairing/angry fonts in 26-point shades of purple, and I suspect I’d be the most blocked commenter in journal history. Deservedly so. (Is Bernard MT an angry or despairing font, doyou suppose? I think it could go either way, myself.)
In any case, the vast majority of people seemed to be favoring the point of view that now is not the time to be pointing fingers, and on Friday morning I agreed.
For the love of... Just get those people out of there!
But a couple of night’s sleep (well, nearly; who can sleep well?) a little perspective, continuing rescue efforts and some further reading led me to conclude that now, in fact, is precisely the time to call our leaders to accountability. Now is when they should have stepped up to the plate. These are the days to demonstrate their commitment to the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the time that they could have, would have, should have been ready, able and willing to save thousands of American lives. This is the moment of truth.
Tim Rutten of the LA Times was one of the many who wrote of the Nostradamus-like prophesies of the Times-Picayune which had predicted:
"People left behind in an evacuation will be struggling to survive. Some will be housed at the Superdome, the designated shelter in New Orleans for people too sick or infirm to leave the city. Others will end up in last-minute emergency refuges that will offer minimal safety. But many will simply be on their own.... Thousands will drown while trapped in homes or cars by rising waters. Others will be washed away or crushed by debris. Survivors will end up trapped on roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by water, with no means of escape and little food or fresh water, perhaps for several days."
Rutten went on to report that:
“Since 2002, when all these reports ran, the Times-Picayune has published no fewer than nine stories reporting that the combination of tax cuts, the war in Iraq and the demands of homeland security had led President Bush's administration to repeatedly reject urgent requests from the Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana's congressional delegation that it allocate the money to save New Orleans.”
This is an administration that has been characterized by its arrogance and willingness to put cronyism above the welfare of its own people. Under this administration, Joe Allbaugh was named director of FEMA with no crisis management experience other than that of being a Bush campaign hack and, according to Michael Hiltzik (Times Business Correspondent), in 2001 called federal disaster assistance “an oversized entitlement program” and advised stricken communities to rely on help from “faith-based organizations…like the Salvation Army and the Mennonite Disaster Service.”
Allbaugh’s successor as director of FEMA is Michael Brown, also without experience in crisis management but possessed of the virtue of being an old college pal of Joe’s, has blamed the mounting death toll on the sick, the poor and the terrified who failed to heed warnings to get out, blaming them for a failure to prepare, and described security in a city with roving snipers shooting at rescue parties as “pretty darn good.”
In the meantime, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, which has come under fire for its reconstruction work in Iraq, has begun accessing a $500 million Navy contract to do emergency repairs at naval facilities on the Gulf Coast, having been awarded the competitive bid last July to provide debris removal and other work associated with natural disasters.
On CNN I listened as Bush, who waited 4 days to visit the site of the worst natural disaster in his nation’s history, promised that New Orleans would be rebuilt and would be “fantastic.” He also declared that Trent Lott, who lost his home in Pascagoula, would also rebuild, and that his house too would be 'fantastic.' The president said he was looking forward to visiting and ‘sitting on the porch;’ one promise, at least, that no doubt will be kept. It is indeed a relief to know that on Planet Bush, people like Trent Lott do not go homeless.
In Louisiana, after some happy talk about the good times he’d had in the Big Easy and hugging a few locals on the tarmac, Bush and his boys hopped back into the chopper and winged it to Washington without visiting the sick and despairing at an airport triage center.
And on the agenda back in the nation’s capitol? Nothing less than another round of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, gigantic cuts in benefits to the poor, sustained assaults on Social Security and stepped up funding for a war in Iraq that continues to suck money from domestic programs and shows no sign of making the world safe from terrorist attacks.
So the question remains ~ just when is the appropriate time to, at long last, stand up and hold our leaders accountable for their actions? To demand that those we elected to protect this nation and her people ~ every single last one of them ~ do more than grow fat and arrogant at the public trough ~ to at the very least protect their people from preventable tragedy?
Today is not too soon. Yesterday was already too late.
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Hey there friend,
I left a similar comment in another Journal recently but I do believe that the "Times they are a-Changing..."
I have been listening to a lot of my old favorite folk singers recently- Joan Baez, Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Donovan, etc. etc.
Before it even happened, I knew Kayne West , the black rapper villainized for saying that Bush didn't care about black people, would get blasted for being truthful. As I said so myself in a recent entry:
http://journals.aol.com/globetrotter2u/Myfeelingsarereal/en tries/1167
It is a very sad state of affairs when people who simply speak out their feelings against this administration are accused of everything from being unpatriotic to communists. And it is indicative of the example that is coming from the top. Instead of rap, I wish singers would adopt the beautiful reasonating folk songs of the sixties to protest their feelings against the war in Iraq and the imbalance in society that is so obvious with this administration. Young people have to be roused from their slumber to feel some passion, and although I would never want to see the draft come back, if it were rich peoples' sons and daughters being taken from them, this whole war would have a much different tenor.
Let's just keep hollering and be ready to duck.
Maryanne
http://journals.aol.com/globetrotter2u/Myfeelingsarereal/en tries/1167 -
I was also watching when Bush made his Trent Lott comments. It was so insensitive to compare/connect Trent Lott to people wading around in feces at the Superdome and in the rest of the city. It's just another blaring example of just how out of touch he truly is.
I have to wonder what the terrorists are planning now that they see that, even with 3 days warning, America can't respond to disaster.
Excellent post.
XOXO...Kelli -
It is all so heart breaking isn't it. Leaves a person feeling helpless in away. I think that we have all ranted. It baffles me that they didn't have buses there before the storm it. Atleast attempted to evacuate more people and not too play it out so light heartedly. I have lost all words to even try to make any sense of what happened.
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It strikes me as odd that the designated shelter had no medical supplies, food or water. Or port-a-poties or backup generators, or ventilation or security or waste management. Three infants died inside of heat exhaution. There were murders and rapes and sniper fire. Abject misery tempered with squalor and filth.
Katrina delivered the kinder blow, if you ask me. We, the government by the people and for the people, bitch-slapped the hell out of those poor, sick and desperate victims, our brothers and sisters of the gulf coast. And we're not through with them yet.
I see the worst disaster on American soil followed by the biggest class action suit ever filed. It's a great country, ours.
9/8/05 2:04 PM
Sorry, I`ve been sick for 2 weeks. I`ll be back more often.
V