More perspective on New Orleans

In a very well written article, Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News took a break from bashing the feds' initial mis-handling of Hurricane Katrina to single out the incompetence of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and his staff. Well before the hurricane struck, Nagin passed the word that the people of his city would essentially be on their own in the event of such a disaster.

Washing your hands of something does not excuse you, and does not give you the right to shift blame to others. But that is exactly what Nagin is trying to do. His negligence borders on the criminal. Add to that the fact that one third of the New Orleans police force went AWOL in a city with the highest murder rate in the nation, and you have a bad recipe.

To see people like the ever-loopy Howard Dean trying to blame an act of God on one man, and racists like Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters trying to use the event to spread hatred and FUD instead of trying to inspire people to come together, and it’s little wonder why the rest of the world is shaking its collective head. One need only contrast the ugly, selfish behavior of many citizens of New Orleans with the orderly compassion in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

No. This was not handled well at first. Most disasters never are. The scope of Katrina is hard to comprehend. The BBC in its excellent report on what went wrong following Katrina described it well: the swath of damage in the wake of Katrina is as large as the entire British Isles. Stop and consider what the world would think if all of Britain and Scotland were flattened by a calamity.

That is how large Katrina’s damage is, and it is little wonder that no society would be able to respond immediately.

I’m not trying to be an apologist. I’m just as angry with the Bush administration as you are. But I am also a realist.

If you read the first-hand accounts of journalist Josh Norman in his excellent Eye of the Storm blog, one of the most salient points he made was to admonish liberal maven Michael Moore to shut his piehole. Norman, a lifelong Democrat, posited that regardless of the problems so far, this is not the time to denigrate the leadership of the country, but just the opposite. The people who suffered from Katrina deserve no less. And right now, helping those who suffered is what matters, not using their suffering as a convenient conveyence for a cheap shot at someone you hate.

To those mentioned in this blog, I can only hope that they will get a clue.