RSSObservations on 3 Anniversaries: Katrina, “I Have a Dream,” Mother Teresa
Gene Lalor | August 30, 2010
This past weekend witnessed a trifecta of momentous anniversaries. Katrina happened 5 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” on the Washington Mall 47 years ago, and Mother Teresa was born a century ago.
It is already five years since August 29th, 2005, since the incredibly devastating Category 3 hurricane Katrina, the costliest storm in our history, the deadliest storm to strike the United States in 83 years, all but wiped out much of the City of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward as well as laying waste to vast other areas of the Gulf Coast.
Testimony to the remarkable resilience of humankind and the human spirit, with the exception of that Ninth Ward, an area catastrophically flooded by Katrina’s storm surge, reinundated a month later by Hurricane Rita, and still largely devastated, most affected Gulf Coast communities have been rebuilt, if not fully recovered.
Much, perhaps too much, has been written about the failures surrounding Katrina: the failures of the levees, the failures of Michael Brown and FEMA, the failures of Democrat Governor Kathleen Blanco and the Republican President George W. Bush, the failures of the Superdome, the failures of government in general in not doing more to alert New Orleans of the impending disaster, to save more lives, to assist in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, to reconstruct the destroyed, and to console the afflicted.
That focus on failure may have been “too much” for three significant reasons, the first of which is a reason based on the common sense shared by ten year olds but not by politicians, city planners, and builders.
Briefly, politicians, city planners, and builders who authorize and erect structures perched precipitously on the edges of oceans or gulfs or rivers that pay no mind to politicians, city planners, or builders, who never seem to grasp the absurdity of daring the inevitable, of challenging Mother Nature, of tempting fate, human habitation of the Ninth Ward, if not all of New Orleans, should have been prohibited from building.
As the people at Chiffon Margarine warned in the ’70’s, “It’s not nice [or smart] to fool [or try to fool] Mother Nature!”
If not forbidden, then the residents and businesses located in those areas, some of which are below sea level, should have been advised that, whenthe inevitable reoccurs, all possible effort would be made to save them from their own foolishness but that casualties should be anticipated and just maybe they should consider re-locating on dry land and not on reclaimed swamp which was designed by nature to be just that, swamp.
A further advisory should make clear that if anyone chooses to be stupid, the rest of the nation will not be expected to subsidize their stupidity and reimburse them for their material losses.
People who have to “bury” their dead above ground should take the hint: Go live somewhere else! Mardi Gras shoud henceforth be celebrated and its annual excesses be perpetuated in Baton Rouge or Biloxi.
A third reason for the misdirection of charges of failures would be the teflon mayor of the South, New Orlean’s own Ray Nagin. 
Without exonerating FEMA, Bush, levees, government in general, government in particular, in particular the government and mis-governing mayor of New Orleans, Clarence J. Nagin, Jr., has been afforded a virtual free ride in the months and now years since Katrina.
Mayor before, during, and after Katrina, Nagin was re-elected barely a year following the hurricane, amazingly re-elected considering his complicity in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of his constituents.
Five years later and despite conflicts of interest charges lodged against him, Nagin stands unindicted and earns his keep today pretending like Jimmy Carter as if he has a legacy by roaming the planet lecturing on disasters, hurricanes, and, of course, his magnificent handling of Katrina.
The only individual who has gained more significant attention from Katrina is black entertainer and radical son of radicals, Kanye Omari West. Before making an ass of himself by charging Taylor Swift’s stage, West charged the national stage and made a greater ass of himself by claiming Bush let black people die because he hates them.
The bittersweet irony in all that is that it was Nagin, who rode out Katrina totally safe and comfortably ensconced in the New Orleans Hilton, who singlehandedly doomed probably thousands of his people.
I was somewhat-removed to the broadcast self-incrimination by Ray Nagin a few days after Katrina, somewhat removed in that I was sitting on our Long Island North Shore beach listening on headphones to Sean Hannity, when what to my wondering ears did I hear but Ray’s less than melodic, drunken voice.
What caught my ear at first were the bleeps, what caught my ear second were Nagin’s words.
The very-comfortably ensconced mayor was distraught and bitter over the devastating hand that nature and government, governments other than his own, had dealt him and his beloved city and he had sought refuge not only in the poshest pad in town but in the welcoming arms of that elixir of the gods, booze.
Hannity obligingly replayed the slurred words of Mayor Ray a number of times. They should be memorable words but they’re all but forgotten since the rest of the media elected to ignore them in lieu of vilifying George W. Bush as the devil of New Orleans while canonizing Nagin as a savior of that beknighted city.
Before, during, and after Katrina’s initial onslaught, hundreds of school buses that kids normally rode to their schools were available and at the mayor’s disposal. They were sitting, unused, in parking lots throughout N’Orleans, their usual occupants evacuated.
Now, school buses are utilitarian vehicles, big, clumsy, yellow and something less than luxury transportation. But, as mariners say, Any port in a storm, and, even if the very vicious storm, Katrina, were abating, they were available and could have been employed before and during Katrina’s initial onslaught to save lives.
Shortly after Katrina vacated the Big Easy’s premises, they were unavailable and under water.
Mayor Nagin not only refused to use those buses to evacuate his fellow citizens but on Sean Hannity’s radio show freely and graphically admitted his reasons, drunkenly ranting, “I don’ want no f…ing school buses! I want f…ing Greyhounds!”
Try as I might, I haven’t been able to locate that audio and offer instead an article on FreeRepublic.com, via Newsmax.com which reports that Nagin said much the same thing to WWL Radio, apparently after sobering up and vetting his words with his handlers.
In “Ray Nagin: School Buses Not Good Enough,” FreeRepublic reported on September 8th, 2005, ”Nagin turned his nose up at the yellow buses, demanding more comfortable Greyhound coaches instead. ’I need 500 buses, man,’ he told WWL. ‘One of the briefings we had they were talking about getting, you know, public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out of here.’ “
Nagin responded, “I’m like - you’ve got to be kidding me. This is a natural disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans:” http://tiny.cc/sj482
My ears must have failed me when I heard more graphic language than “doggone” on Hannity.
Call it chutzpa, call it arrogance, call it whatever one wishes using whatever language you wish, Ray Nagin was as much or more responsible for Katrina deaths in New Orleans as the crumbling levees, the inept Brown, the bewildered Blanco, the misinformed Bush, the overwhelmed FEMA, et al.
Those school buses sat in their lots and Nagin’s people died. He later blamed everyone but a failed luck of the Irish for his own failures after 80% of his city flooded.
Not being a lawyer, I won’t speculate on whether Mayor Ray Nagin was legally culpable for his actions and inactions during and after August 29th, 2005. I can readily speculate that he is very morally culpable but moral culpability isn’t illegal.
I wouldn’t dare speculate that Nagin escaped prosecution for his ineptitude because he is black. Blaming a black man for the deaths of hundreds or thousands, even if the victims were mostly African-Americans, would probably be construed as prima facie evidence of extreme bias and prosecuted as a hate crime.
Not only that, would it be politically correct to blame a black man for committing such heinous evils against “his own” in what he described as a “chocolate city?”
Next: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., “I have a dream,” and Glenn Beck.
Next: Observations on the “I Have a Dream” anniversary
Contributor's website: http://www.genelalor.com/
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