The aftermath Hurricane Katrina is an ongoing example of how a bad situation can be exacerbated into an unthinkable nightmare by the addition copious amounts of human stupidity. The storm itself was bad enough, but only people can turn a place into the kind of Mad Max apocalyptic wasteland that exists in southern Louisiana now. There's a lot of finger-pointing going on in political and media circles right now, and I don't want to just be part of the dogpile. But the grievants who are getting all the attention just want to score political points. I actually want to get a handle on what went wrong. Plenty of mistakes were made by everybody on every level.
Let's start with the people who were actually trapped in New Orleans. Do you know what they're going to find when the water recedes from the city streets? Cars. Hundreds and hundreds and thousands of cars. Cars that could've been used to drive away before the roads flooded. Because reporters are looking for heartstrings to pull, they're inclined to portray everyone in New Orleans as helpless victims tossed about by the winds of fate. And I know that there were people who were elderly and infirm and poor -- people who were genuinely stranded. But it stretches credulity to think that the vast majority of people didn't either have a car or know someone who had a car. Those people chose to stay. They're trapped now because they were too ignorant to look out for themselves.
I'm not saying that they don't deserve help now -- ignorant people are still people. But the point is that, instead of New Orleans' poor and infirm to rescue, we were given that plus a healthy dose of nimrods. Some people are still refusing to leave. Hey, genius, you may want to cancel your subscription to High Times, because it's going to be a while before the post office can get it to you.
As for the New Orleans mayor and city government, the pictures of unused busses will be their legacy. In all fairness, when the storm was bearing down, state and local government faced a worst-case scenario for politicians: they had to make a decision where the consequences would be immediately apparent. It wasn't a five year plan to marginally improve city schools or a bond issue for some roads project that wouldn't be completed until long after all parties involved had collected all the graft they could squeeze out of it and retired to some Caribbean island without an extradition treaty. They could either order the evacuation or not.
If they ordered the evacuation and the storm wasn't as bad as advertised, then they would face all kinds of grief. The operation would be incredibly expensive. Looters would stay behind and do their business. The police might have to beat or shoot some of them, leading to the inevitable lawsuits and accusations of racism. On the other hand, if they don't evacuate and the storm is as bad as the experts say, then they are negligent morons responsible for the deaths of possibly thousands of people.
The problem with things that have never happened before is that everyone assumes they never will happen. So, state and local government rolled the dice that the storm wouldn't really be that bad. It wasn't until far too late that they finally started to think about evacuation and/or preparations for people trapped in New Orleans. The only option available to the savvy politician then is to blame somebody else for your bad call.
Of course, the scapegoat du jour is the federal government. The feds probably suffered a little bit of denial too, thinking the hurricane couldn't possibly be that bad. However, as more information comes to light, they're looking less incompetent than Mayor Nagin would like everybody to believe. The President apparently begged Gov. Blanco -- clearly out of her league -- to federalize the operation, and she waffled for days.
I've heard some critics say that the President should have sent in the Army anyway, whether Blanco wanted them or not. There have been a lot of mistakes during this disaster, but obeying the posse comitatus act is not one of them. It's a good law, it's there for a reason, and if the Governor had removed her head from her rectal area, it would've been a mere formality to comply with it. Instead, stupidity and territoriality cost the rescue effort precious time.
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