I am gratified to see that someone else noticed that our dear President did not stoop to mention the Katrina recovery in his recent State of the Union address. A few minutes devoted to former basketball player Dikembe Mutombo, sure. Katrina, nothing.
I guess Mr. Bush figures he has paid his Katrina dues. After all, he spent a day in Louisiana in August. My heavens, what more can a man be expected to do? There is so much brush to be cleared on the ranch in Crawford, and with the press around, he can’t hire illegal immigrants to cut it like he used to.
For those of you reading this from distant parts of America who wonder how this matters to you, consider this: FEMA did a horrible job in the aftermath of the storm, is doing a horrible job now with the recovery, and yet the President has done absolutely nothing to correct these problems and improve disaster preparedness in this country. If you live near a coast, or a fault line, a nuclear power plant, or a volcano, you should be afraid.
I didn’t expect G.W. Bush to say, “We’re sending another $100 billion to New Orleans.” We got money last year. There are a number of things I still think could be addressed with further funding (namely, much better levee construction), but the federal government has committed a substantial amount of money already. But I do expect him to say, “Disaster preparedness is a very important part of our national security. We need to make wholesale changes to FEMA to make certain Katrina never happens again.” He is not doing this. He don’t seem to care. And many people could die very soon because he doesn't.
My understanding is that we are fighting the Iraqi war because 9/11 happened. If we accept this argument, then this implies that it is proper for the U.S. government to spend hundreds of billions to protect its citizens from harm. Disaster preparedness is certainly an important part of national security too, and a person would have to be a fool to continue, even after Katrina, to aggressively pursue anti-terrorism to the near-exclusion of disaster preparedness.
I live in a small town in Mississippi. The chances that my town will ever be a terrorist target is almost nil. The chances that I could lose my home in a flood or tornado or hurricane is much higher. So why is all my tax money going to support the war against terrorism, and nothing to disaster preparedness?
Katrina was a mess. But I’ll admit it; people can screw up. I have seen many terrible screw-ups, and been the author of a few myself. What counts most is not the screw-up, but what you do after the screw-up to make sure it never happens again. I’ll leave it to the reader. Do you think the government has taken enough steps to make sure that Katrina never happens again, to us Gulf Coasters or to anybody else? If you think it has, go back and read the State of the Union address and show me where you are finding evidence for this belief.