This is where it starts. Our government does not realize the steps it must take to take care of our fellow citizens who at this moment are wondering if they have enough food to last until the boats and helicopters come. Unfortunately, no matter how much gas prices rise, no matter how many homeless and dead are counted this country, the people and the government, will not change. I wish it will not be true. 9/11 only made us scared, it did not make us more secure. Could this be different?
I think this points to who we are as a country. I think we need a radical change in priorities or else we will find ourselves in a situation where we have fallen behind in the world. We will spend Billions on rebuilding other countries that are a threat to us, but not Billions to provide basic help to our own impoverished. We are falling behind radically in math and sciences but we will spend money providing assistance to other countries instead of reforming our education system to ensure that we have the best educated people in the world. I’m 28. In 30 years will I be able to trust a 28 year old to be capable of what I am?
Our world is changing. Ideas, energy, micro-anythings, computers are the things that will be driving our world economy as we transition to an information economy. When we can’t build the best computers, design the best systems, make the best bio-cures we are in our steep slide to irrelevance. We need to leave no child behind - good start. We need No Teacher Should Have to Beg For Anything. How do we become an example to others? Why don’t we make the world become dependant on our ethanol instead of being dependant on OPEC? Why don’t we build 500 square miles of Solar Panels in Arizona and sell off the spare energy to the world?
This is a time to think big. This is not a disaster to fix and go back to how we were. This is the time to heal and build stronger. We can’t go back to last week’s gas prices or last week’s New Orleans. We have to accept it, provide for our fellow citizens, and make ourselves a better nation. A model nation.
Midnight
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02krugman.html?ei=5089&en=aeb44b693f7ee0b0&ex=1283313600&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
September 2, 2005
A Can’t-Do Government
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. “The New Orleans hurricane scenario,” The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, “may be the deadliest of all.” It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.
So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.
First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you’d expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn’t provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all.
There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn’t they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government’s response.
Even military resources in the right place weren’t ordered into action. “On Wednesday,” said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., “reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!”
Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. “The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission,” a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.
Second question: Why wasn’t more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. “The corps,” an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, “never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain.”
In 2002 the corps’ chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration’s proposed cuts in the corps’ budget, including flood-control spending.
Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA’s effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.
Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: “I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared.”
I don’t think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor.
At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.