Monday, September 05, 2005

Hurricane Katrina

I've said nothing so far about Hurricane Katrina. I am simply stunned that the infrastucture of one of America's great cities has collapsed. The winds and the sea have done what bin Laden could not do.

The response on the part of our leaders seems to be underwhelming. FEMA in particular seems to be hung up on bureaucracy when people are dying. Although I share his Christian faith, I have never been a fan of George W. Bush, and I've seen nothing in the past few days that inspires confidence in his administration. I can't help remembering that he responded well to the four hurricanes in his brother's home state of Florida, which was a swing state in the upcoming election. Am I being cynical in thinking that the response would have been better if there were presidential votes at stake?

Rather than being a tragedy that unites us as Americans, like 9/11, this is a tragedy that accentuates the differences between rich and poor, black and white. There is no outisde enemy who did this to us, there is no one to whom we can sing, "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way."

I do not know if this will shake faith in God, or strengthen it. If we have been sustaining our faith in God by believing that whatever is wrong in the rest of the world, it can't happen here, then our faith has been a faith worth shaking.

This column, by George Will, is worth reading.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9014028/#storyContinued

4 comments:

Blue Devil Knight said...

This has been a horrible week for the United States' residents. I am hopeful (foolishly) that this will draw attention to the obvious economic disparities that exist in the country. Liberals like me have been focused almost solely on Iraq. The huge and growing underclass has shamefully become quite invisible in our moral map.

Good article by Will. This whole catastrophe has had a lot of people mentioning Hobbes. It is interesting how people behave when the usual regulatory structures are removed. I wonder if there was less looting in Indonesia after the Tsunami because people tend to live in smaller, more self-contained and self-governing villages.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a whole literature in anthropology on the effects of natural variables on social order. Someone probably did her thesis on it in 1980 and everyone thought she was crazy studying such an abstruse topic...


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Now we'll see if the spamblocker works... :)

Blue Devil Knight said...

natural variables on social order.

I meant natural disasters, not natural variables :) Though I guess one is a subset of the other.

Jason Pratt said...

Victor wrote: {{There is no outisde enemy who did this to us, there is no one to whom we can sing, "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way."}}

I'm a bit surprised that the looters and snipers haven't come under such rhetorical fire (even though they'd be gone by the time the ass-kicking arrived).

As far as I can recall, FEMA never has had such a huge situation to try to manage before, so it really has no experience in doing so--and we're seeing the results of that. (One could expect that experience in a number of smaller problems would aggregate into experience handling larger problems, but one would be wrong. {s}) This isn't like multiple hurricanes hitting Florida, or even terrorists bringing down a couple of skyscrapers (as bad as those were).

This, for all practical purposes, is having _three_ large American cities important to our national infrastructure, completely soft-nuked.

Except without the dramatic population loss, which is actually making the situation harder to get a grip on in some ways. (Live people need more Emergency Management, Federal and otherwise, than dead ones.)

And while it would be nice (at the moment) for Bush to just take charge and make things happen faster, that isn't how our system works in real life. (Even if he did help unsnarl some red tape in Florida, instead of only being rhetorically present so to speak--which I'm dubious about--this situation is several orders of magnitude worse.)

I suspect if he could, and did, we'd soon hear complaints about how he has amassed dangerous amounts of power thereby, taking advantage of the tragedy for his own purposes, etc. Bush is basically at the point where anything he does, or doesn't do, will be held against him.

(I think that's largely his own fault, too.)


PS: yay blogger, love the new anti-spam! {G!}

Jason Pratt said...

{{Let's not skirt around the issue to protect our favorite president.}}

Well, he's far from being _my_ favorite President. (Frankly, I think he should have been impeached long ago.)

Consequently, I have a specially specific Christian duty to be as fair to him as possible. {s} (Same is true about my opinion of Clinton, too; whom I think had better management skills--and whom I thought, and still think, also deserved to be impeached.)

That being said--yeah, bad idea to put FEMA under DHS. The two departments only overlap in cases of un-natural federal-level disasters (like 9/11).

On the other hand, I'm curious what kind of exercise they did last year that could have feasibly given them _experience_ in dealing with the reality of something this big. Did it involve several hundred thousand real people, for instance, in a hundred thousand real and disparate situations relative to the simulated disaster, spread across 90,000 real square miles? Real people in real space and time, complicate an exercise enormously... {s}

At the risk of drawing an inappropriate parallel {grimacing in Bush's general direction}, it's like the difference between going to a real strategic-level war for the very first time, and having bureaucratic exercises in preparation for going to a real war. The exercise may easily be far from useless, but it isn't real experience in something of that scale.

In any case, I definitely agree: we weren't prepared. I don't know that we _could_ have ever been prepared without the real _experience_, though. In a backhanded way, we might be lucky: the relevant authorities now are getting experience in something that could be duplicated not too far down the road (i.e. hitting a port with a real soft-nuke, or with a poisoning of the water supply.)