Rant from NO friend - Democratic Underground

Chalco

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Mon Sep-12-05 12:55 PM
Original message

Rant from NO friend

(I received this a few moments ago from a good friend from NO. She was angry and responding to someone else and sent me a copy.)

I am here and I know that this has been a total f**k up from the start.

Do not go there with excusing them. That would be a crime. This is a crime scene and I am so angry I could spit!!!

If someone tells you otherwise, or you read otherwise...THEY just don't know.

I don't care WHO in the 'public arena' people might have been working on this before the hurricane but they weren't getting it here. FEMA kept all these wonderful efforts at bay just on the outskirts....for DAYS while people were sick, trapped, hungry, in
need of medical attention, DYING.

I talked to Red Cross who were very frustrated the very next day...because FEMA was refusing to let them in to distribute food/water/ATTENTION to victims. And they stopped lots of other volunteers as well. The only way you could get it was to sneak in.

We're very grateful to all the people who came down here to help with various agencies, firemen, utility workers, the armed forces, when they were finally allowed in, etc--but that doesn't excuse the fact that they were not allowed in to help until 5 days after the fact. Wal-Mart was in the very next day with truck after truck of supplies even before FEMA arrived to stop them. FEMA was totally incompetent under the leadership of Brownie/horse show manager. Any attempts to shift blame from our government - on both the local, state and federal levels is a crime.

This IS a crime scene down here and I, like nearly every single other victim here, am just so mad I could spit. Please do not go there...you just DON"T know.

It's easy I suppose to sit back in your air conditioning, eating 3 square meals a day, and having life going on as normal, to sit back and be an 'arm chair' critic of this...to come back and say, Oh it wasn't so bad...the government did the best they could. No one could have known how BIG and WIDESPREAD this would be....you shouldn't blame them for letting all those people die" but I'm telling you right here and now, that would be WRONG of you to 'go there'. I'm telling you from first hand experience, that our government has FAILED the state of Louisiana and it's people...as well as the people in Mississippi. And it still 'ain't over' :(

Please excuse any typos...I just woke up and I'm feeling very angry. It didn't need to happen like this.

Besides the EXTREME tardiness and incompetence/disorganization of the relief response, there's also the fact that programs to rebuild the wetlands have been consistently slashed by Bush year after year since he's been in office. Oil companies, OTOH, have continued digging thousands of canals throughout the wetlands making them weaker and weaker where they are making the state literally disappear...which all has made us even more vulnerable to even mild hurricanes.

They've known for years that this would happen if a big hurricane hit. Not that it 'might happen'...that it WOULD happen. You can go to pbs.org and find an article about this written back in 2001. And yet they cut the funding that would have got us on the right track. WHY? Because OIL is more important to them. Because they think of 'saving the wetlands' as unnecessary spending because it's not a money making venture, but to them an 'environmental liberal cause'. They can think only with short term vision. It's all just such a crying shame. I'm sick about it.

YOU obviously DON'T really know or understand what happened down here and what we are going through. You CAN"T if it didn't/isn't happening to you.

(This is real folks. I wish it wasn't.)