What we didn't see
Here's a post from the Columbia Journalism Review on the images from the New Orleans Convention Center that NBC decided were too bad for us to see.
I personally think that seeing the dead babies might be the kick in the pants Americans need to get help to these people faster and to resolve never, ever, to let this happen again.
We don't need a sanitized view of this disaster. We need a real, eyes-wide-open view. We need to burn those images in our memories so that we have the resolve and the dedication and the long-term willingness to sacrifice in order to make our country a better and safer place. This process will take years, will require a permanent change in mindset. We need memories of this natural Pearl Harbor to be our sustaining rallying cry.
Remember the continuous coverage after 9/11? And now you see coverage on the cable channels, but people who want to can just drown themselves in their usual soaps and "reality" shows.
Before this disaster, the continuing no-news of Natalie Holloway got the public's attention more than Iraq and certainly more than Afghanistan. It's time Americans opened their eyes and paid attention for the long term, to this disaster as well as to the wars.
We need to see what is going on if we are to "never forget."
posted by OKPartisan @ 1:01 PM
6 Comments:
We also need to see these images to remind us of how important good local government and real leaders are.
This never would have happened under a Frank Keating or a Brad Henry. A competent local and state government is worth a lot more than a competent one thousands of miles away in D.C.
The governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of NO and the NOPD are representative of a long history of corrupt and incompetent machine politics.
The NOPD kicked off the looting by sending mixed signals (including participating in it themselves and abandoning their posts) and things only got worse from there. This Roy Nagin is certainly no Giuliani - and he's shown he's a complete amateur and unfit for office. The governor of Louisiana ain't much better.
Why didn't anything approaching this happen in Florida, when they got hammered by four hurricanes last year? Those weren't nearly as bad, but they also got hit 4 times!
It's a contrast in local leadership.
NY after 9/11 had a leader - brash, abrasive, and on a roller coaster of public opinion -- BUT NONETHELESS A COMPETENT AND TAKE-CHARGE LEADER. Florida after 4 hurricanes had a leader. Oklahoma City after April 19 and after the worst tornado to ever hit an urban area (two disasters that in the 1990s were among the worst things Americans thought we would ever countenance) had a leader. And Mississippi also seems to have a calm and competent leader at this time. The fact that they're all Republicans has NOTHING to do with my point. I am completely confident that Brad Henry -- a Democrat -- would NEVER have let something like this happen on his watch.
And the mayor of N'Awlins showed his ineptitude for public office by losing his cool. Did Giuliani ever lose his cool when America was under attack by unidentified malevolent forces? Not for a second.
New Orleans and Louisiana had empty suits propped by a decadent political machine - woefully unprepared for the demands of the real world.
Did Mayor Nagin or any of his inept functionaries think to plan for generators for backup power at the convention center or the Superdome? No. Did Mayor Nagin or any of his inept functionaries dream that with an enormous and notorious criminal element in their city, they might need to plan ahead for martial law? No. Just two examples -- there are many more that will be ferretted out in the months to come.
At some point, we Americans are going to need to start getting back to the idea of personal responsiblity and local control. A lack of both were on horrific and tragic display in the meltdown in the Big Easy.
Consider that the next time you vote -- Republican, Democrat or anything in between -- make sure you know that the name you check on the ballot doesn't just line up with your political sensibilities, but is also an individual who is actually up to the job.
I appreciate your views, Red Dirt, and I agree that local leaders are important. I think, though, that this disaster is way beyond the scale of any of the previous ones you mentioned. For instance, I was in NYC shortly after 9/11,and unless you were in the area of the disaster itself, life went on as routine. New Orleans, by contrast, is an isolated total loss. And the job in NYC was, in fact, bungled. I have heard enough post mortems on both it and the OKC response to know that there were lots of errors. In NYC, they could not secure the perimeter of the site and had a bunch of amateur volunteers on the rubble pile, in the way of the professionals who needed to do the job. They didn't have any port-o-potties, and so those who were working used the pile as their bathroom, making it hard for the search dogs to look for buried victims. The hospitals near the WTC were overwhelmed and overloaded, even though they had a whole city around them that could have helped.
One thing you need to remember about disaster response is that it goes from a local issue to a federal one depending on the size of the problem. When the locals are overwhelmed they call for mutual aid from surrounding communities and from the state, and then the state does the same with the federal government. With a disaster of this magnitude, anyone with any disaster experience would know that this is primarily a federal response problem. There is plenty of blame to go around, but it is unfair to say that local officials should have been able to handle this.
Remember, too, that local officials had wanted funding to address the flood risks, and that this money was diverted for other projects.
As for why Florida did so much better? Those hurricanes were NOTHING compared to this one. And there is quite a bit of controversy about why, for instance, $30 million was given to people in Miami who weren't even victims. The cynic in me says that the fact that that was an election year and Florida was important for the outcome, and brother Jeb was in office there, may have had something to do with it.
People were also irate at the federal government's response to Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992.
Let's face it. No one in our country is really prepared for a big disaster anywhere. The smaller ones you mentioned (9/11, OKC, last year's hurricanes) seemed to go okay when viewed from the outside, but that's because we could mount an overwhelming response to cover our mistakes. When you have something this huge, with 90,000 square miles of disaster area and thousands of stranded victims, we are no match for the task.
Disaster preparedness has never been taken as seriously as it should be, because it involves developing plans and allocating resources for things that may never happen. Why spend money on levees for a hurricane that hasn't happened in half a century, when we have wars to fight? Old people who can't afford their prescriptions?
Disaster preparedness doesn't earn many points because, if bad outcomes are prevented, no one knows what investments and hard work and personnel it took to make that happen.
And another thing. People in Mississippi have waited for days and days and days to see any sign of state or federal response.
You are buying the right-wing line that this is all Blanco and Nagin's fault.
No, not buying any particular line. I haven't read much online except for the New York Times. I just know anecdotally what I've heard about Louisiana and New Orleans for years -- that it's a corrupt zone filled with incompetent leaders from both parties, but in particular a zone of corrupt and incompetent Democrat machine politics. Incidentally, this has nothing to do with party politics at the national level and much more culturally to do with Louisiana itself (Huey etc.). And I know that every person I've ever met who went to New Orleans (I've never been there myself) said it was a rather rough city filled with a large criminal element (please note that is not a code word for "black"). Put these two things together -- corrupt machine politicians who don't know how to do their jobs, along with a destitute population crowded alongside plenty of drug-addled sociopathic hard cases, hit it all with a storm of biblical proportions and you have a recipe for failure.
All I know about Miss. is that it does not seem to be experiencing the societal meltdown that is happening in New Orleans.
P.S. Nagil's WWL interview -- in which he talks about all the crazed, armed drug addicts on the streets -- is my source for the comment about "sociopathic hard cases." Figured I'd take it straight from the source -- officials on the scene. If Nagil says there are a bunch of Mad Max crazies loosed upon the Big Easy, I'll take his word for it.
It's interesting to note that our constitution is written to keep the federal government from just being able to run roughshod over local governments and the state and local governments are allowed to raise taxes for their own use such as the repair, restoration, improvement etc. of levies. The laws that protect local governments from the power of an overpowering federla government are the same ones that require the local governments to request help from the feds.. If you listen to most of the pap from the "where were you" crowd they want the feds to just show up and save the day. However...They, the " where were you" crowd will be the first ones to complain when the feds do "one day" just show up uninvited for any reason. Our constitution was set up this way for a reason and it should stay this way. What really needs to happen is that the people of N.O., and other communities unfortunate enough to have such and inept mayor as Nagin, need to quit electing people unfit to collect your garbage as officials and begin looking for better men to run their communities. Nagin has showed himself as someone more wiling, and capable, as a blame shifter and thousands are dead because of his lack of leadership. Fire him and put someone in there who actually cares for the citizens of N.O..
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