Thu, 01 Sep 2005

Katrina and flood control

Emperor Palpatine says I'm silly because I blame dubya for a massive hurricane basically destroying a major US city. Well, no, and don't put words in my mouth, thanks.

My point is not only that if all you can do is sign a few cheques, at least have the respect for the victims and show up on TV having fun a few hours later of reporting the most destructive natural disaster in your country. Appearing to care a bit about what's going on seems like a good idea, when you're POTUS.

Besides the appearances, there's other stuff you can do before the hurricane hits. For example, you can try not to divert flood-control funds to your little adventure in the Middle East. It's sad to learn that most of the money earmarked to the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA) suddenly got diverted to Iraq when things started to go too wrong around the Persian Gulf.

The ongoing repairs to levees and other flood control measures in the area were not finished when they should have, and now the nice city of New Orleans is a deadly lake. I'm not saying levees and dams are the ultimate solution but they surely would have helped in this case, as the tsunami alert systems in the Pacific help when they need to.

But I guess Jaldhar thinks all the war stuff was really necessary, and the money was worth it. Probably what the American voter really cares about, according to him. I have this utopia in my head, it could have been used for other matters, like fixing some of the social problems in the US that make your urgent rescue operations a problem because with the amount of guns out of control in the US, your helicopters get shot. Or helping getting rid of famine, plagues and epidemies in those spots of the world where the poverty situation only generates what you call "terrorism". Or simply helping your economy to be less polluting, so your country doesn't contribute half of the emissions to the atmosphere that are causing global warming, and, for example, make hurricanes and typhoons like Katrina even more deadly.

New Orlean's shame

This is self-explanatory.

When I saw the images of what's going on in New Orleans, the first thing I thought is that if the news had been talking about Asia or Africa, I would have very well believed those images were shot there. It's obvious that when it comes to extreme natural disasters like Katrina, the first and third world are quite alike.

I hope all our community people in the area are ok, even if not thanks to dubya. Some day he'll realise that saying "God bless you" isn't enough.