I can't believe how unprepared the US was in response to Hurricane Katrina. Ever since September 11th, local, state, and the national governments have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on "homeland security". If you'd ask anyone in August 2001 what homeland security was, they wouldn't have a clue. But anyway, this money was spent to make people safe, in our own country.
We have the FBI, the CIA, state police, city police, sheriffs, spies, secret service, the army, marines, air force, navy, coast guard, the national guard, border patrol, state militias, DEA, and the ATF protecting us. Congress can pass Constitution-raping laws like the anal-probing Patriot act, which lets the government examine my medical records and the books I took out of the library. The government can tap my phone conversations, trace my internet history, and view every financial transaction I've ever had.
Yet, the government couldn't turn on the weather channel to realize that there was a giant red menstration dot on the map, heading straight for US mainland.
People always complain about Bush for ignoring September 11th, that it could have been prevented, had he actually done his job. I like to believe this too, since I hate the guy, but think about. We were playing Monday morning quarterback about it. How many different briefings and dossiers does he get on a daily basis? Tons. How many times do you think someone threatens the president's life, or the country's safety for that matter? Daily. Hell, he probably has a few death threats from me. So I could see how one could fall through the cracks like that. And I'm sure he feels like an ass for missing it (after that, the country took every threat seriously, from exploding pens, to poisoning our water supply, to spiking cocaine).
But the government has NO excuse to be so ill-prepared for a hurricane. We've spent the last four years on edge, waiting for the terrorists to strike, somewhere, somehow. And our nation's job was to respond to a crisis like this in a moment's notice. We knew Katrina was coming. We knew for days. And not just the government. Everyone knew, the entire population of the country knew, days in the advance that a level 4 to 5 hurricane was going to hit the US.
We had time to prepare. We knew that it was probably going to hit New Orleans, the only city below sea level in the nation. We knew that the levees could only handle a category 3. We knew after the storm that things would be devastated. We knew that mass amounts of people didn't have any means to evacuate. We knew all of this stuff, long in advance. And everyone knew it.
What would have happened in New Orleans had a major terrorist cell attacked instead of a natural disaster? What if we didn't have a week and a half notice? How pathetic would our response time be for that? We can't even handle a disaster THAT WE KNEW WAS COMING!
Everyone likes to point out that the looting and the crimes were committed by poor people trying to take advantage of the situation. All the looting, the murders, the rapes, the robberies, could have all been avoided, had the situation been handled correctly in the first place.
I guess all your tax money is going to Iraq now, you know, to keep the "peace". In fact, if they weren't so many members of the military over there right now, maybe we'd have some in our country to actually protect us from real threats. By the way, Bush, great job on finding those weapons of mass destruction in Middle East. I can finally rest at night, knowing the US is safe from Iraq. People will ignore your war because they can't see the death and the destruction, but the American public is going to lynch you for costing them an extra ten dollars a week in gasoline. People have their priorities mixed up.
What did we do to prepare? Um, we half-ass reinforced the levees and told everyone to leave. Well guess what? Not everyone had a way to get out of the city. How many poor people are living in any given metropolitan? They don't own cars. They have nowhere to go, and what little they had was washed away. I'd be looting too.
And the levees failed. Big surprise, cause they always do. The government says, well, the levees were designed to maintain the water level, and they weren't supposed to break. Well, condoms aren't supposed to break either, but they still do.
$100 billion dollars in damage - even Bill Gates can't afford that tab. Only an estimated 25% is covered by insurance, while the jobless rate in the Gulf is 25% now. Post-Katrina, New Orleans stands as a bad, made-for-reality-TV version of Kevin Costner's Waterworld.
I hope things get better soon.