Unquiet

I hope too many people don’t mind that I don’t post a second installment of ‘Self-Help Buddha’ today - it is in the works, but for much of this week my mind’s been elsewhere, whether it relates to the events unfolding in Louisiana or more local concerns such as getting my health insurance set up so I can visit a few doctors and make sure I’m a healthy boy.

In about twenty minutes, I’m off to work. Maybe that gives me enough time to voice some concerns about what’s happened on the mainland, and to wonder why the tragedy had to happen this way.

When terrorists attacked New York City on September 11, 2001, the government responded much more slowly than it could have. For some reason, military planes that could have scrambled to intercept the two planes headed for New York did not fly until it was too late. Still, government response and aid came _that day_.

Why did help take nearly a week to arrive in New Orleans? Some of the answers are obvious: both our internal and external armed forces are strained by fighting battles in wars that are supposed to be over (as defined by Bush). Both regular military and National Guard are fighting in Iraq (_though I could’ve sworn that NG was designed for **internal defense**_) in numbers that leave our country unprepared for disasters within its borders, natural or otherwise.

I suspect that we’ve only begun to hear the horror stories coming out of the Big Easy. As the lives of New Orleans refugees begin to return to some level of normalcy, their stories will come out _en masse_. And those stories will raise a lot of questions that will be difficult for Americans, especially our government, to answer satisfactorily.

People wonder why New Orleans descended into lawlessness so quickly, and I’ve heard comparisons to New York City after 9/11. _There’s no comparison_. For the scope of destruction to be the same, imagine that, instead of demolishing a limited set of buildings, the attacks leveled 80% of Manhattan and much of the surrounding burroughs - including the poorest ones. Imagine that thousands were trapped inside the city.Imagine that the government barely responded to the crisis for a few days, and that no sign of help showed up on the first day.

Or the second.

Or the third.

Or the fourth.

Imagine that they had little food, little water.

Are we that naïve to think that New Yorkers (perhaps because of the relative lightness of their skin color or size of their wallets) would not descend into the same lawlessness as some residents of New Orleans?

I’m happy to see that hope is finally reaching the survivors of this storm. But I agree with sentiment expressed in a BBC story: the response to this disaster shames and disgusts me. What _was_ a natural disaster of major proportions has become a man-made tragedy of incredible dimension.

And regardless of the backpedaling currently being pushed on us by our government, I hold Bush and his administration responsible. We can all offer to help, but he held in his hands the tools and manpower to move much faster and more effectively to save thousands of lives.

And he didn’t. Why?