Last week I took a tour of http://www.whitehouse.gov/. I have been on the site before, researching former First Ladies and Presidents. There were a few tours of the various offices in the white house made by the then President George W. Bush and some pictures of the Laura Bush showing off the White House some Christmas a million years ago. I had seen these features a couple of years ago and was surprised they were still up.
Today I visited www.whitehouse.gov and things have certainly changed. President Obama has updated the site and has taken the time to write down exactly how he feels on each issue and how he will reform them.
The President, under ’Additional Issues’, conveys exactly how he feels about former President Bush’s failures concerning Katrina and how it was handled. Below is the text written on the website:
Katrina
President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.
President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims. Obama visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region. He worked with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to introduce legislation to address the immediate income, employment, business, and housing needs of Gulf Coast communities.
President Barack Obama will partner with the people of the Gulf Coast to rebuild now, stronger than ever.
The President categorically says that he ‘will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast’.
During Hurricane Katrina, my husband and I were in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We lost power almost immediately and with it air conditioning and water. Our cell phones didn’t work and we were basically miserable with the August heat. Like many of our neighbors we had underestimated the hurricane. I had already been through at least one ‘hurricane’ in Hattiesburg and it was a lot of fuss about nothing. This made me complacent. I will never again be complacent about a hurricane.
We stayed one night after the hurricane and due to over-heating and lack of water we decided to try and make it to Missouri where my husbands family live.
Making this decision was a gamble. We had ¾ of a tank of gas and there was none in the state of Mississippi to replenish us when we ran out. We were just hoping that when we got into to northern Louisiana they would have electricity and therefore gas. Luckily we found gas stations in Tallulah, Louisiana.
When we arrived at my In-laws, we both took showers and slept for about 12 hours. When we awoke we decided to go and watch the news. Looking back on it, it seemed so unfair that up in Missouri we were able to watch on T.V. exactly what was happening in Louisiana and Mississippi and they were completely unaware. We were saved from two weeks of no power or water or food. They were not so lucky.
We watched as people sat on roofs next to bed sheets with the words, ‘Help Us!! The Water is Rising’. We watched them look up at the helicopters and wonder why they were not being helped? It looked like they were in Africa, or India or somewhere in the developing world. It did not look like America.
President Bush claimed in an interview last week with CNN that he was proud of the way the Coast Guard and Law Enforcement had reacted after Katrina. He said they were out immediately rescuing people off roofs. He is right, they were. That had little or nothing to do with him though.
I saw pictures of old people slumped against walls or floating in river water. For them the Coast Guard was too late. And to me, even one death meant the response was not fast enough.
People say, “Why didn’t they evacuate when they could have, there were buses all over the city to take them to Houston, or the Superdome?”
Would you leave everything in the world that you had? Not knowing if it would be stolen while you were gone? It’s not an excuse but it’s my way of understanding. There are people all over America who would NEVER leave their homes, no matter the emergency.
Now we need to focus on rebuilding. There is a man in my neighborhood who rides around with a bumper sticker saying “Rebuild New Orleans, not Iraq”. It seems crazy. We are spending millions of dollars in Iraq every week when we could be spending that money to help pull the poorest residents in the ninth ward out of poverty. These are Americans right? The constitution is here to protect us. But what weapon do we have to protect us from a President with a warped sense of right and wrong?
I find it hard to sleep at night knowing there are children in New Orleans who aren’t getting the food they need or the basic educational skills they require because the funding is only slowly trickling in.
President Obama is right. We all need to help. We all have a responsibility to help rebuild New Orleans and our economy. Think of something you can do. Don’t delay, think right now. Something. Anything.
Help them.
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