Yonit Shames & Daniel Cecil
Published: September 28, 2005
Inevitably, in the wake of any major tragic occurrence, such as the tsunami in Southeast Asia or Sept. 11, our media and leaders insist upon playing the “blame game.” So it is that we have had to endure the usual finger pointing, name calling and mud slinging in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Even before Monday quarterbacking could begin, Michael D. Brown, the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, resigned- but it should be obvious that he was not solely responsible for the botched recovery efforts. There is still plenty of blame to go around. Despite White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s insistence that the administration would not play the blame game, both President Bush and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco publicly took responsibility for failures in the government’s response to the disaster.
However, there is little comfort and even less accomplishment in their proclamations. Nor is there much solace in Congress’s Katrina probe committee, which was appointed on Sept 21 to discover flaws in the government’s response to Katrina, because, according to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), “The American public… deserve(s) to know what happened in the early days of the storm.”
Admittedly, there were critical errors and cases of negligence both in the preparation for and the response to Katrina- mistakes that, had they not occurred, could have prevented the tragedy from being as great as it was. Did New Orleans have ample notification and preparation time? Did anybody have a contingency plan for this sort of disaster? Was the National Guard pre-staged? Was there any sort of coordination between the various local, state or federal government agencies involved before and after the storm? All of these questions must be answered if Katrina’s mistakes are to be avoided in the face of future disasters.
But it is more important for us to remember that, like the Dec. 26 tsunami, Katrina was an act of nature, and nature does not always allow the luxury of contingency planning. Concentration on recovery efforts is far more helpful and beneficial than finger pointing and should be the government’s primary response to the event at this point. Let us bury the dead, rebuild the cities and, when the time is right, fix the failures in the system that could have prevented the enormity of Katrina’s damage.
Right now, Katrina’s victims need something other than partisan politics. They need political representative and government officials who will do their jobs and help alleviate their suffering. It’s about time that they stop wasting energy and our tax dollars on pointing fingers and instead concentrate on the business of rebuilding, fixing problems and formulating a reasonable recovery plan. That is what they were elected to do.