Well, of course I want to mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I should add that a close friend died suddenly a few days ago, so best-laid plans to continue this blog on that actual anniversary date needed to go awry. However, today is two years plus two days since that cataclysmic event, so I think it's still fitting.

This blog was originally used for my students in my Summer 2007 online courses, but now I have transitioned away from using this for school, so I no longer need to censor my bias. I found something I wrote on September 5, 2005, that I would like to reproduce here.

A Nation in Shock

In times of crisis people come together. They think not of their differences, but of their similarities. They think not of their localities, but of their nationality, not in the sense of being separate, but in the sense of being part of one nation. That is when Americans need their federal government most, and that is why Americans from the Gulf Coast to Alaska felt so let down by the response to Hurricane Katrina. That is why the bureaucratic bungling was so particularly insulting. Over time we have gradually allowed our government to become too far removed from its people, and this is the result.

We must look at this as _our_ response to Hurricane Katrina. After all, our federal government represents _all_ of us. Has it represented us well? We were already the laughingstock of the international community. With this we've corked the bottle, in contrast to the broken levees of New Orleans.

This is a multi-state tragedy. This is when and why public service should trump privatization. There has perhaps never been a better example of that.

A crisis response is not the same as a business-as-usual response. That is one of the basic tenets of crisis intervention.

In a curious evocation of Nero and Marie Antoinette, Bush twiddled rather than fiddled while New Orleans flooded rather than burned; meanwhile his mother made comments that were virtually to the effect of "Let them eat dirt."

Perhaps we should be evacuating people to the mall in Washington, DC. I envision Bushvilles springing up as Hoovervilles did during the Great Depression when that President's big business leanings led to insensitivity toward the suffering of millions of those just as friggin' American as he was -- sound familiar?

Cherty and Brownie and his oh-golly-gosh, "this is hard" incredulity.

Nothing the terrorists can do to us is worse than we can do to ourselves.

We are all from New Orleans.


jdm