The Hurricane Finger Pointers
The Bush haters are out in force again on the airwaves, as they were in the 2004 campaign. Now George W. Bush of Texas is supposedly the cause of the chaos in New Orleans. As a native New Orleanian who grew up through some memorable hurricanes, the accusation is utterly laughable. We grew up with the obvious precursors of the chaos we are seeing today on television.
When I was very young, I recall the highly destructive Hurricane Betsy which struck New Orleans on September 9, 1965--almost 40 years ago. Betsy was a Category 3 hurricane and caused heavy flooding in New Orleans--just take a look at this photo gallery provided by the government of St. Bernard Parish, a parish that has just been utterly devastated again by Katrina. I recall seeing my uncle in a rowboat in the lower 9th ward section of New Orleans, the same section of New Orleans that has suffered the worst effects of Hurricane Katrina. Then, in 1969, came Hurricane Camille. I remember Camille because I recall cutting myself while playing inside during the hurricane. Camille devastated the same Mississippi Gulf coast that Katrina has again destroyed. I also recall hearing older people talk about a terrible hurricane in the nineteen forties. What you are seeing on T.V. today in New Orleans was utterly predictable and is utterly unsurprising: a Category 5 and Category 4 Hurricane Katrina has simply magnified the destruction previously caused by Hurricanes Betsy and Camille.
In 1965, the year of Hurricane Betsy, George W. Bush was 19 years old. In 1965, Louisiana was in the grips of a long dominant Democratic Party. The White House was held by Democrat Lyndon Johnson. Since 1965, everyone in New Orleans with any capacity for self-reflection knew that someday there would likely be a Katrina. Obviously, for 40 years, governor after governor, mayor after mayor, state legislature after state legislature failed to address the looming and known threat adequately, diligently, and persistently. This gross negligence is astonishing given that these same people lived through Betsy, Camille, and previous hurricanes and that these same people were risking themselves, their loved ones, and their livelihoods by taking no aggressive action to prevent the Katrina we all knew, all along, was likely to come someday.
In fact, the weekend before Katrina, I visited New Orleans for the first time in years. On the visit, I pointed out to a Michigan friend, who had come along for the visit, that the large lake to the north of the city, Lake Pontchartrain, was a looming threat to the entire city because a hurricane could push the lake waters over the levees and flood the entire city. I pointed out this fact, which is common knowledge in New Orleans, in a perfunctory manner never imagining that the very same scenario would be played out tragically one week later. My own mother had said for years that one day the city of New Orleans would be wiped out by water. It has come true.
And so on the weekend just before Katrina struck, the Louisiana authorities ordered a mandatory evacuation. As you can see on television, our Louisiana state and local officials did not follow up. Thousands of people are coming out of the woodwork, among whom many are elderly or sick or both. It is amazing that I read today on the internet that there were 80 elderly persons stranded in an old folks' home in New Orleans. Mandatory evacuation without implementation is a joke. On the day the evacuation was ordered, policemen and public employees manning school buses should have visited the old folks' homes, the hospitals, and the public housing developments to implement the mandatory evacuation.
My friends, there has always been, as far as I can remember, a very large, poverty-stricken, and extremely uneducated population in New Orleans. I bet that some who are being evacuated today were not even aware that a very dangerous hurricane was on the way. I bet some of those being evacuated today did not even have a clear grasp of the meaning of the word "evacuation" prior to the disaster. No level of ignorance would surprise me. So for local and state officials to call for mandatory evacuation without having police and public employees fan out across the poor neighborhoods and senior centers of New Orleans was an act of gross negligence now documented by the TV cameras.
The cause of the chaos you see today in New Orleans was 40 years of willful neglect by a long line of governors, mayors, and other public officials who knew better and who as Louisianians were intimately familiar with the threat and who had a lot to lose personally by not addressing the threat adequately. The Bush haters, once again, are living in an ideological fantasy world. Most reasonable New Orleanians know where the real fault lies: in us.
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