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Tag: Katrina

“What Didn’t Go Right?”

Oh, such innocence: What didn’t go right?

[Nancy] Pelosi, speaking at a news conference, said Brown had “absolutely no credentials” when Bush picked him to run FEMA.

She related that she urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Brown.

“He said, ‘Why would I do that?'” Pelosi said.

“I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right last week.’ And he said ‘What didn’t go right?'”

“Oblivious, in denial, dangerous,” she added.

McClellan disputed Pelosi’s account of the meeting, and later, Brown sidestepped when asked whether he had offered his resignation.

If you’re up for more ridiculousness, try to figure out what McClellan’s rebuttal sounded like.

via Preemptive Karma and Media Girl

A Must-Read

This story made me cry:

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding.

Transporting the children alone was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead” or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans.

“It goes back to the same thing,” he said. “How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?”

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Uncategorized

More from the Times

Today, it’s Tom Friedman who sticks it to the President:

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending “intelligent design” as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

So true. And my goodness do I love Maureen Dowd:

The administration’s foreign policy is entirely constructed around American self-love – the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have.

But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don’t see freedom. They see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths. They see some conservatives blaming the poor for not saving themselves. So much for W.’s “culture of life.”

Raw

My professor modeled a grammar and linguistics lesson as an example of ways we can slip the boring English stuff into more exciting curriculum. She was specifically modeling a mini-lesson one could use in a secondary school that teaches the difference between denotation and connotation, using the refugee/evacuee debate that has been in news media this week. As I always do when contemporary politics are discussed in the classroom, I scanned the room to see my peers’ responses. I glanced over just in time to catch a guy turn to his friend and say

“Well, they told them to get out, so…”

He shrugged. Massive loss of human life and all he can muster is an “oh well” and a shrug. I don’t know what my face looked like at that moment, but he caught my glance for a second and likely registered my horror. He didn’t appear to care.

This aftermath of hurricane Katrina has left me feeling crazy. Livid. Violent. It was all I could do not to climb over those tables and strangle his cavalier, arrogant neck.

UPDATE:
Anne, a friend who also attends my university, is experiencing a different but no less removed debate in her classes:

It started on Friday in my social theory discussion group. Our graduate TA started the session by asking if any of us knew anyone involved in “the situation down in New Orleans”, or if anyone would like to say anything about “the situation.” A gal raised her hand. Her sister was on her way back to university, but had to turn around once the storm hit. She’ll probably attend a local college for this semester, maybe even next semester, too.

Another gal raised her hand. “I think that what is happening down there is horrible and totally unexcusable. Our government has totally failed.”

A guy raised his hand. “My major is emergency management, so I’ve been talking about this for a few days now. What people need to understand is that this isn’t an easy situation, and all that can be done is being done.”

Another guy: “Yeah. Plus, those people had what, a week’s notice that this storm was going to hit? They had plenty of time to leave.”

A gal: “Look. The government knew New Orleans was vulnerable because of the levees, but they never got repaired. Plus, all the response teams are in Iraq so there’s no one left to help these people.”

“There are response teams to help people; they just don’t want to leave. People have been shooting at the helicopters that are trying to bring food and water!”

A debate ensued between those who saw the situation as a failure at the government level and those who view it as a failure of the individual to leave when told. Many sat quiet. The discussion took up the entire meeting.

Yesterday, my history instructor started class by asking if anyone would like to say anything about “the situation in New Orleans.” A guy raised his hand.

“Well, this is certainly a bad thing that happened, but those people had what, a week’s notice to evacuate?”

Another guy added, “Two weeks.”

“Yeah, they had two week’s notice, and they didn’t leave.”

After the third person to talk echoed the same thought, the instructor said it is important for us to pay attention to what is really going on in New Orleans. Then he started his lecture.

Busy, etc.

My apologies (yet again) for the lack of posts. Life has been crazy lately. Luckily, Lauren holds down the fort exceptionally well.

The first week of law school has been good — incredibly interesting, stimulating, and really friggin hard. I have more reading than I’ve ever had in my life. My professors are fantastic, and the other people in my classes are all really smart. It’s a big change from high school and even from undergrad, where there were always at least a handful of kids who really didn’t have their shit together. Here, everyone is on top of things. All the comments made in class are well thought out. No one has said anything particularly dumb yet. It’s an interesting experience, and I definitely feel like the small fish. But that’s a great motivation.

In other news, I finally found an apartment, and spent the weekend moving in. I’m living on the Upper East Side, which is a big change from downtown. I do miss the Village, but I love my new neighborhood. Once I make the apartment pretty, I’ll post pictures! The only bad thing is that we haven’t been set up for internet yet, hence the slow blogging. But that should be going sometime soon. Until then, I’ll try and make at least one daily stop at the NYU library to use their computers.

I also don’t have a TV at the new place, which is good. Watching the news lately is just way too depressing. My mom called me on Saturday night and told me that Rehnquist died, and basically said, “We are fucked.” The more I see, read, and hear about Katrina’s aftermath, the angrier I become at the complete ineptitude of our various government agencies in dealing with this issue — particularly because I sincerely believe that if it were thousands of middle-class white people left stranded, they’d have their shit together.

So, despite the general depression I’m in because of the state of this country, I’ll be back to blogging on and off, hopefully with some consistency at least this week. Next week, once I enter the age of wireless internet, blog-life should be good.

Looting(?)

Thoughts on “looting” by Dr. B. who grew up in Detroit with the history of the race riots:

The best story of the the Detroit uprising was the story of a friend’s mother. On the day the rioting started (before things got going) a young African American mother went to a fabric store to buy thread. She was made to wait while the sales clerk waited on white folks and told not to touch things (yes this was Detroit in 1967!). She left without buying anything. Almost 20 years later when this mother passed away the son that she gave birth to 2 years later found a box of untouched thread in the attic. It turns out that once the uprising started later that day the woman went back to the store and got thread. Thread that she never used, but thread that probably made her feel better. Thread that made her feel empowered in a world of racism and oppression. So, can I understand why folks are stealing t.v.’s and other electronics even though they can’t use them now and may never be able to? Absofrigginlutely! You take what has been denied to you for so very long.