Though just about everything I have been thinking in the past few days has already been said, none said it better than Michael Moore:

“I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don’t let people criticize you for this — after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don’t listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn’t cut the money to fix those levees, there weren’t going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them — BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!”

That’s right…just when we needed our own resources the most, they’re halfway around the world in a war based on complete lies, hurting people that just want us out. I’m sure this isn’t lost on all the people starving on their roofs. This is how you treat a red state? Oh, no wonder the mayor was pissed off. You heard his radio interview, right? (If not, there’s a transcript here. I think it’s better to hear the actual audio, though).

And wow, as for what the rest of the world of the world thinks of our organizational skills…not much.

“”To see homeless dying of thirst and lack of medical care in the middle of the street escapes comprehension,” the paper said. “The world asks how [the Americans] were able to take food and water so quickly to remote Indonesia and cannot save New Orleans.”

In Europe, some commentators saw links between the disaster and unpopular U.S. policies in Iraq. Germany’s environment minister associated the catastrophe with the Bush administration’s position on global warming. Others saw a racial dimension to the tragedy.

“The fast and secure evacuation has been of white people,” said the German leftist daily Die Tageszeitung. “Poor and black people stayed behind. It is as if time had stopped between the racial unrest of the ’60s and today.”

Yeah…come to think of it, did anybody notice how photos from news agencies of white people leaving stores with stuff were titled as “scavenging” or “finding,” while other photos of black people doing the same thing were labeled “looting”?*

Of course race and poverty are inseperable issues, and as a comment on Jon’s blog by “GeorgiaGirl” pointed out, it’s hard for middle-class whites to “get” what makes the situtaion so much worse than 9/11 (emphasis mine):

“The thing that strikes me the most about this disaster is how much we need to be working every day to get people out of poverty. The people most affected are the poorest of the poor. Of course they are desperate, angry, and in some cases violent. If I lost everything, I could pick up the pieces and rebuild. I might lose things sentimental to me, but I would have an extended family to reach out to, some money in savings, an insurance plan. Some of these people couldn’t leave because they didn’t have cars, gas money, transportation… We have failed these people long before the storm even hit.“

No shit.

Things look pretty bad for the envirornment too. But then, we’ve been ignoring the obvious for a while.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Salon…some of my favorites:

Why New Orleans is Sunk
Katrina According to Fox
Was Race a Factor in Relief Delay?
Tulane Cancels Fall Semester
Out of the nightmare, into the Astrodome

It’s worth sitting through one ad to read those.

People on the inside have been saying this is much worse than New York’s 9/11, and just looking at the map, that certainly appears to be true. If it takes a month or longer to get all the water out of the city, that’s a long time for dead bodies to stew in the Louisiana heat. My God, can you imagine? Imagine that’s your mother, father, kids stewing? What a horror show that’s going to be.

This disaster has ripped open a whole host of ugly, old wounds that this county has never dealt with very well : North vs. South, white vs. black, rich vs. poor–and it goes without saying it’s going to make things so much harder. The conservatives are simply going to blame the victims–you watch. They don’t know how to do anything else; it’s the history of the GOP in a nutshell. Opening their mouths instead of their wallets and homes.

Did that sound angry? Sorry. But just look at this fucking mess…how can you not be angry?

* Look, it’s that “liberal media” at work!

Tags: new orleans, katrina, hurricaneKatrina

How to Help

Write your local paper: is it time to bring the National Guard home?
Offer your home
Flickr group auctioning photos for donations
Red Cross, or Red Cross via Amazon

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More Reading
And an assessment from National Geographic.
A Colossal Failure of Leadership
Mayor’s Tirade Get’s Bush’s Attention