America in Crises: Katrina and misplaced priorities

During this whole crisis in New Orleans and the rest of the southeast, I have finally come to understand why blogging and other forms of the new media are so important. "Army Corps of engineers shot at by police, several dead due to mistaken identity." That is what they said. Fifteen minutes later the truth finally came. Police who were escorting the Army Corps of Engineer Contractors had to help some fellow police officers, left the Army Corps and several of the shooters (civilians gone mad) were killed in the shootout.

But it is this type of reporting that has caused so much confusion among the rescue efforts. Politicians using the media to blame other politicians. The media using angry people for the high drama, though their reasons for anger are usually misdirected and supported by false information.

It is not that the anger is not legitimate. I am angry. I know people are in rage because of the entire ordeal. The problem is, there is nobody to be angry at. It was a natural disaster not an attack by Osama bin Laden. So we attack one another, the politicians and government, the entire system that led to this and more often than not we become angry at God for not stepping in.

But maybe this is more of a case of misplaced priorities than some sinister plan for God to teach us a lesson (though that may be a secondary benefit of this cruel life lesson). Maybe God is not to blame.

For years, civilian engineers lobbied their politicians to put more money in the maintenance and strengthening of the levee system in New Orleans. For year there were more important things to spend money on. A war in Iraq diverted much of the money to the international project of securing a country built on the oil industry.

Nobody listened. They new the big one would eventually hit. And yes, from a category 5 hurricane, the damage would still be immense. But if the levees would have held, thousands of lives would have been saved and New Orleans would be rebuilding as we speak.

We ignored warnings and denied the necessary funds to secure a city because we had more important things to do. More important than the lives of thousands of people. We may not have said it, but that is how we acted and thousands of people have paid our adolescent self-centeredness with their lives.