Your Most Trusted Source of Foreign
News and Views About the United States
|
|
Your Most Trusted Source of Foreign
News and Views About the United States
|
By Friedemann Diederichs
Translated By Hartmut Lau
September 12, 2005
If reality were in accord with Barbara Bush, the president's mother, the almost 400,000 people made homeless by Katrina and who are now living in crowded emergency shelters are "better off today than before the storm." After all, the New Orleans' underclass, which lacked the wherewithal to flee in a timely manner, were "underprivileged" before the storm.
[Editor's Note: Her exact comments were, "So many of the people here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them. ... What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. Almost everyone I've talked to says: 'We're going to move to Houston.'"]
Presumably this statement, more clearly than any list of government breakdowns and failures, demonstrates the mentality of Washington's political elite. This illustrates an arrogance toward the poor that will not only have far reaching consequences for crisis management, but will exacerbate the nation's widening social gap. While the terror attacks of September 11, the fourth anniversary of which was marked on Monday, united the Americans in the short term, the days after Hurricane Katrina highlighted the divisions of American society. One basic issue: would the government's response to a natural catastrophe that experts have dreaded for years have been quicker and more effective, if a majority of the affected had not been poor and black?
George W. Bush's attempt to bandage these wounds with verbal pathos and appeals for unity are likely to be less successful than the current intense efforts to pump the-now-mostly uninhabited New Orleans dry.
The nation's hope that four years after the trauma of 9/11 its government would have better plans for dealing with a major disaster have been brutally disappointed - above all by the political leadership's colossal failure. The reasons: incompetent agencies, insufficient contingency planning for emergencies, inadequate coordination, and a man in the White House that filled important positions such as the top post for protecting against catastrophe on the basis of party membership rather than on the basis of qualification.