I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to adequately express my feelings concerning the events of the past two weeks. I’ve had a range of emotions and responses, and one of them is, quite frankly, anger about the flawed initial response to the disaster. I’ve read a variety of first-person accounts, from both residents and international visitors and there is no excuse for the lack of a proper response. Simply put, people died due to the inability of our leaders to effectively manage a risk and an outcome that had been modeled not even a year ago.
I don’t have the energy to list all of the various problems I’ve heard about these past couple of weeks, but someone else did take the time to list, via a set of relevant web links, many the reasons why This is not My America. While I might have chosen a few different articles to link to, taken in total the article presents a good overview of the failures of the past couple of weeks.
And after all, isn’t it through self-reflection and an ackowledgement of our errors that we improve? ‘Cause I’ll tell you what, in my America, infants and the elderly don’t die due to a lack of water and medical care 3-5 days after a national disaster, while being guarded by National Guard troops instead of being evacuated by them. There is no credible excuse for some of the recent failures, and I hope the leadership of our country acknowledges that we can, and must, do better in the future.