LGBT WORLD DAILY NEWS

Katrina: One Year Later
Today, there are hurricane warnings in Florida as the president makes his thirteenth trip to the Gulf Coast since it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina one year ago. He isn’t planning to make any new aid announcements or policy proposals, nor is he planning to spend much time with people most affected by the storm and its aftermath. He plans to give an address to “persuade local residents and doubters elsewhere that he remains committed to seeing the region rebuilt better than before.” He will spend most of his time in Mississippi, rather than “harder-hit, less-recovered New Orleans,” and after his lunch with community leaders in Biloxi, he will “walk through a damaged neighborhood and visit a Gulfport company that builds and repairs boats.” Today will be a day for photo ops.

Today is not about the recovery of the Gulf Coast, not really. Because even though one year later, the “job of clearing debris left by the storm remains unfinished, and has been plagued by accusations of price gouging,” and even though one year later, “tens of thousands of families still live in trailers or mobile homes, with no indication of when or how they will be able to obtain permanent housing,” and even though one year later, “important decisions about rebuilding and improving flood defenses have been delayed” and “little if anything has been done to ensure the welfare of the poor in a rebuilt New Orleans,” and even though one year later, huge numbers of people are still displaced, the president doesn’t believe in the significance of this anniversary, or pointing to it in urgency to get local and state officials, who he blames for the delays in rebuilding, to get things done. What today is really about is the recovery of Bush’s image.

But this catastrophic mess is his to own. It was the finest moment for Bush Conservatism, which advocates a social Darwinism that first leaves people without the means to evacuate and then allows those on higher (and dryer) ground to blame the drowning masses for their own desperate circumstance, which advocates the appointment of people to government specifically because of their disdain for its basic duties on behalf of those most in need of its service, which advocates “starving the beast” to make the federal government as effective as a tiger without its fangs, which advocates cronyism that finds useless, incompetent twits in charge of a massive emergency operation.

Katrina was the inevitable failure in the wake of Bush Conservatism’s success.

Today, in spite of Bush’s desire to separate himself from the shining glory of his most precious policies, we remember how he failed Americans, and failed America.

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