Why you gotta act like you know when ya don’t know?
I feel like I should be down in Louisiana and I’m actually thinking about going down with one of the teams (if they let us in).
It’s kind of funny to see that all it takes is a bit of water to get people to start shooting at each other. The alleged racism, the rapes, and the murders at the emergency shelters are despicable. The US Federal government doesn’t seem to want to help either. They’ve only just sent in rescue and recovery teams two days ago. People were left without food and clean water for almost eight days. The Feds also didn’t know about a stadium full of people which resulted in more people dying. What’s making this all worse now is that the US Gov is being too arrogant to accept any help from what they obviously cannot handle on their own. The Mayor of New Orleans, The Hon. Ray Nagin, was left to fend for himself. The Reverend Jesse Jackson had to step in to get the people’s attention.
If you’ve been watching the news — don’t watch CNN. Watch the BBC, CBC, or CTV if you can. Do you know why they’re not allowing us (non-Americans) into the disaster zone? Because of the thousands of bodies they’re trying to shelter the people from seeing. The whole situation was and is being handled with completele inadequacy. Mr. Bush cut down on the disaster response budget not too long ago and this is the backlash. But I suppose nobody can really prepare for this kind of thing.
Now you can’t exactly blame anyone for a natural disaster and that’s true so I’ll stop playing the blame game myself and hope that the US Gov will start accepting more outside help.
As I’ve watched the news over the last week or so I’ve come up with a few theories on why the US Feds took so long to respond to this disaster. The most prominent factor was money. The disaster response budget was cut down and I’m assuming that it will cost about 10 billion US dollars to re-imburse 10,000 people. That would mean a big cut out of the war machine budget but that probably isn’t it. The US government couldn’t possibly be worried about money when it concerns the lives of their citizens. The most likely and most possible situation is that the US has spread their forces too thin and thus could not respond to the disaster in time. Most of the US military, helicopters, etc. are currently in Iraq. It takes time to get the much needed helicopters back to the USA from the middle east so this is another backlash from the Iraq war. Blunder after blunder.
The flood water won’t recede until the levees are repaired but that still means they’ll need to pump the water out of the city. That could take anywhere from three weeks to three months. Maybe if they hadn’t clear-cut the forests that surrounded the city the flooding would have been a little less? Let’s not even get started on the pollutants that have now entered the Louisiana flood waters. All the bleach, kitchen-cleaners, soaps, and acids we store in our houses multiplied by hundreds of thousands of homes are now in the flood waters of Louisiana. Let’s not forget about the diseases now cultivating in the water too and the mosquitoes that will spread them. The in-country refugees were also herded together into a confined area and still are. The spread of disease will be multiplied because of that.
There aren’t enough doctors to help this many people. A retired Senator has even gone in to help treat people. Now hopefully the US military is letting in the foreign doctors or else these survivors won’t be survivors anymore. I still can’t believe that they are/were actually turning away foreign assistance. I don’t mean just India but even Canada.
This rant’s gone on too long. There’s so much more we all need to know.