Katrina Commentary

I know I'm two days late with this, but here it is my commentary regarding the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. As heard on the August 31, 2007, edition of WPRB NEWS PRESENTS THE WEEK IN REVIEW.

Many of you already know that this past Wednesday was the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. If you got a chance to watch the television news or picked up a newspaper, it’s almost guaranteed that you saw the images of the destruction the storm caused. As I sat in front of a television set that morning, I saw President Bush hold a news conference at a school in the Lower Ninth Ward. At some point during his speech, he said something to effect of, “I understand what you are going through. The people in Washington not from Louisiana understand what you are going through.” I nearly lost it at that point, but I bit my tongue and put my thoughts in this commentary.

President Bush and the bureaucrats in the District of Columbia have no idea how bad the situations the people of New Orleans have had to endure. If he did, he never would have told “Brownie” (for the uninitiated, former FEMA director Michael Brown) that he was “doing a heck of a job.” If Bush really knew what New Orleans was suffering through in those first few days, he would have sent aid to those stuck in shelters of last resort and more troops than he did to New Orleans to restore law and order. If the other people running the nation in Washington knew what the people of New Orleans needed, they would have put pork-barrel projects aside to make sure that the levees that protected the nation’s second-largest port—the fourth-largest in the world—were strong enough to hold the storm surge that eventually caused the flooding of eighty percent of the city. Unfortunately, the politicians that have represented the State of Louisiana in Washington for the past fifty or so years failed their constituencies and allowed their personal gains to trump the needs of the state.

Despite all that needs to be fixed in New Orleans, there are other place often ignored the mainstream media that also need repair. Before I saw coverage from Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian, Mississippi, I thought the big boys of news forgot that Mississippi took the brunt of Katrina’s wrath. (Remember that it wasn’t the wind and rain that messed up New Orleans. It was the break in the levees.) These two towns, as well as others along the Mississippi Gulf Coast were obliterated and are in the process of rebuilding. Because these towns don’t have tales of high murder rates and looting, their stories get pushed by the wayside in favor of the juicy details of the goings-on in New Orleans. These towns need help as well. These towns need their former residents to come back and to rebuild if they haven’t done so already, but FEMA or some other federal government agency should help out as well. If the government can afford to give subsidies to farmers, it can certain help pay for rebuilding efforts of those living in Mississippi and Louisiana two years ago and want to return home.

A week or so after Katrina hit, President Bush stood in a darkened Jackson square and said of New Orleans, “This great city shall rise again.” He also said this past Wednesday during his speech that better days are ahead of New Orleans. If this is the case, the federal government and those that represent us in that government need to wake up and recognize the problems that plagued New Orleans before Katrina and fix them immediate—the levees, in particular. If the government fails to do this, then this great city, the State of Louisiana, and possibly this nation may suffer a fate no American could possibly imagine.