Food for Thought Continued
Conclusions
- Hmmmm. I guess we’re just so technologically advanced as to not want to use a river for transporting people and materials. If it was good enough to be used during a weather emergency 100 years ago it’s not good enough to be utilized in the 21st century.
- Hmmmm. In some places people use gunfire to attract attention. Like in the "Ramar of the Jungle" films or some other fiction. In some places in the United States people do use guns to communicate more than their displeasure with their neighbor. In an emergency situation they may fire their weapon to indicate their location. Maybe that’s what the rescuers misinterpreted.
- Louisiana's governor is Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. Female, white and Democrat. The help her state, and the city of New Orleans in particular, received is the topic of discussion around the world.
The assistance received in Mississippi was decidedly different. According to Governor Haley Barbour, white, male and Republican, who stated in a televised interview on Sunday "Over here, we had the Coast Guard in Monday night. They took 1,700 people off the roofs of houses with guys hanging off of helicopters to get them. They sent us a million meals last night because we'd eaten everything through. Everything hasn't been perfect here, by any stretch of the imagination.... But the federal government has been good partners to us. They've tried hard."
- Perhaps this colossal lapse in leadership is the result of incompetence, partisan politics, poor planning, bureaucratic territorialism, racism, sexism, and just plain old complacence...or a combination of them all.
There are 12 different states dealing with more than 200,000 survivors. There are corpses in the streets of New Orleans. There is life threatening disease in the receding flood waters filled with the corpses of dead animals and humans along with raw sewage and toxic chemicals. The clean up will take months. Some experts predict it could take years.
If you want to help the evacuees, please use these helpful links:
To assist with housing needs contact:
Hurricane Housing
- http://www.hurricanehousing.org
Open Your Home
- http://www.openyourhome.com
To provide food:
Second Harvest
- http://www.secondharvest.org/default2.asp
Mercy Corps
- http://www.mercycorps.org/
Acorn Institute
- http://www.acorn.org/