SEPTEMBER 7, 2005

       The world watched in horror as possibly thousands of people were killed by hurricane Katrina. In the days, and probably even weeks or months following, the U.S. government will be bombarded by questions from its citizens and the media as to what went wrong with the federal response.

       Did so many lives have to be lost? Could the response time have been faster? We would hope the answers to these questions are obvious, but when we factor in the conditions that responders would have to go through the picture may not be as clear.

       For instance, would the armed guards sent to the Gulf Coast have been prepared for the water? We know they can handle desert conditions in Iraq and overseas, but can they swim? The thousands of military officers overseas have already dedicated their time to threatening the lives of other innocent individuals, so they are already spoken for. They were not available to help threaten the lives of those back home who were innocently swept up in the massive flooding down south.

       As we hear eyewitness accounts of the devastation in the large arenas in Louisiana we learn that officers are patrolling with guns and pointing them at people who may simply be getting irate from having no food or water for several days. I'm guessing these gun-toting men and women have already had a decent meal somewhere if they had the strength to be carrying around such heavy artillery.

       As the television cameras rolled in it meant news crews were lining up the best shots of people in their worst hour, hoping to catch a glimpse of the real horror of the scene so we at home could experience it too. We saw these people reporting from the sidelines with people needing help in the background, almost as if they didn't exist to begin with. The reporters used words like "distraught", "unfathomable", and "horrible". Very rarely did we hear them make statements like, "I held on and pulled him to safety" or "We rescued a family..." Again the question remains, how did these news crews arrive from all over the country with equipment ready to go and begin broadcasting live before there was a national response from the government? CNN actually flew in a reporter from the Africa bureau to cover the events and was there faster than some U.S. government officials. There is no way you can say the media is ahead of President Bush. Or can you?

       If such flooding were to happen in Washington, D.C. would there be a faster response? Is there a back-up plan for a natural disaster striking at the White House? I'm almost certain there is. I wait for the day when I see George Bush struggling and frantically flailing his arms in the water as news helicopters fly overhead.

       However we see in true Bush style that at first he commends the response of the National Guard and other respondents to the tragedy. He then changes his word to condemn them for taking too long and dropping the ball. And then at the next press conference/photo-op we see him praising the response again. Which is it? Are you happy that thousands of Americans have died because of your lack of response or not? Perhaps he's looking at this from a dollars and cents point of view and now figures that the country is better off for losing these people so that there aren't an estimated 37 million Americans living in poverty in the world's richest nation anymore.