"In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!" -Ron Carlson
So many other people have written about hurricane Katrina and the aftermath that I hardly feel the need to. Most of them have done it much better than I ever could anyway, like James Lileks in his Screedblog:
There seems to be a competition about who can be Angrier about Katrina, since conspicuous emotion is now the primary signifier of compassion and concern. Those in the hurricane’s path have every right to anger or sadness or whichever emotion they have. But in the punditry circles there’s an angrier-than-thou mode that often seems intended to establish one’s bona fides as a critic of the relief effort. You may well have a timeline that buttresses your desire to distribute culpability across a broad spectrum of officialdom, but I AM ANGRIER THAN YOU SO MY COMPLAINTS MATTER MORE.
I especially liked this:
If the federal government had decided to make New Orleans safe from floods, and had unlimited funds, it could have done so – either by building 67-foot walls or moving the entire city or enclosing it in a dome and blasting it into space. Give them a blank check and 27 years, and they’ll probably get it done, and done well. But Big Government is not good at dealing with things that happen at 3:57 PM Eastern Standard Time tomorrow.
I once heard the federal government described as being like an ocean liner; it doesn't stop or start quickly. Of course, that's kind of how it was designed. No one person has ultimate authority and power to make decisions. Means no one person has the power to make bad decisions without anyone having the chance to stop them, but it also means no one person has the power to make good decisions without having to consult a lot of people, take a few votes, form a few committees, etc. That's what you get in a democracy. That's also why there are state and city governments, to hopefully take care of some of the smaller stuff, as well as taking some power away from the federal government. You know, I'm thinking a little review of early American history might be instructive to quite a few people.
