Thoughts On The Past Week

I wasn't going to post an entry on this subject, but I've received several requests from you, my faithful readers, who asked for my opinion on how the hurricane rescue efforts have been handled.  So here it it is.   

On Monday, it will be two weeks since the devastating hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, Biloxi, Gulfport and hundreds of thousands of lives. Almost a week went by before food, water and aid was given to the majority of the evacuees.  That is pathetic. Once again, our country is being criticized by other countries for not taking care of its people.  I have to take the side of those other countries on this one.  Republicans, Democrats, the political party affiliation doesn't matter - the government let those people down. 

I was truly sick to my stomach last Friday when I heard Michael Brown say that he honestly didn't know that twenty thousand evacuees were stranded at the convention center.  Yes, the whole week had been a nightmare, and I'm sure that he and other government officials working on the hurricane relief efforts forgot a few things.  But that was something that the head of FEMA should have known.  Heck - we all knew it, just from watching the news.  I'm sorry that it took almost two weeks for this shiester to be fired from his job at heading up FEMA. We learned that he had been fired from his previous gig as head of the Internation Arabian Horse Association.  Well, that tenure surely made him qualified to head up FEMA, now didn't it?  If he had gotten demoted sooner, maybe there might have been more survivors. 

It will never make sense to me why it took so long for the stranded people to get help.  News crews were able to brave the flood waters and debris and get to the hardest hit areas just minutes after the hurricane moved through; you can't tell me that rescuers couldn't have gotten there, too.  Harry Connick, Jr. was even able to get in to the flooded downtown area of New Orleans.  If a singer can do it, how come government and military, who are trained for this type of thing, had to wait almost a week to start helping?  What would it have taken for someone higher up to tell the military to get as many helicopters in the air as possible, load them with bottled water and MREs andstart dropping them down to the stranded people? 

For the past week, we've heard countless reports from rescuers who said they were ready and equipped to help just a day or two after the hurricane hit, but their orders never came.  For whatever sick and twisted reasons those in charge had for the delay and neglect, that's something that they'll have to answer for on Judgement Day.