"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus -- Etched on the Statue of Liberty
"...the magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans."
President Bush, 3rd September 2005
posted by Stuart at 23:29
2 Comments:
Quite a contrast, unfortunately, between the two statements.
As an American,
I am outraged beyond words by the inaction and seeming complacency of the Federal Government in their initial response to the Katrina disaster.
I am brokenhearted by the suffering and indignities experienced by folks on the Gulf Coast, especially those stranded in New Orleans.
I am touched and appreciative of the outpouring of support from around the world.
While I can understand the criticism of Bush and Co about the Katrina disaster, I think the real problem lies with the endemic US attitude of “we’re the superpower, we’re right, so we don’t need contingency plans just in case we’ve get things wrong”.
Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico are not exactly unknown; Katrina was originally forecast as one the most serve hurricanes, so surely the State or the Federal governments should have had some sort of emergency plans for various scales of disaster. Yet it seems to me that the politicians had no initial idea of how to confront and manage the magnitude of the crisis and resorted to “make it up as we go along” mode.
The complications (far too trivial a word) in Iraq, the un-preparedness for 9/11 and its aftermath and now Katrina along with many more examples since WWII, can be explained, in my opinion, by an increasingly tunnel vision about the “faultlessness” of US philosophy.
Maybe, just maybe, this disaster may make the majority of Americans (whom I adore individually) think about their vulnerability.
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