Western Courier

Issue date: 9/7/05 Section: Opinion

Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast over a week ago, leaving tattered cities, towns and lives in its wake. Since then, America has been a cesspool of criticism regarding relief efforts.

It's easy to sit back in luxurious condominiums thousands of miles away and complain about the way these efforts are going on paper. The reality is that no one outside of the people who are at ground zero have any idea what's going on down there.

The news reports we get are sugar-coated. Images of New Orleans dominate news stations and newspapers when Mississippi cities such as Biloxi and Gulfport took more damage. Video of celebrities, such as Sean Penn piloting a boat and Eli and Peyton Manning unloading supplies from airplanes are inserted amid pictures of flooding and structural damage.

It is bad down there. New Orleans is lawless. CNN has suggested that as many as 80,000 people are left homeless, and these citizens are ruling the streets while authorities can get no order. Meanwhile, the same streets are contaminated with bacteria, such as E. coli.

Two police officers have committed suicide. The boss of the second to do so suggested that he may have taken his own life because he lost hope that order would ever be restored in the city, according to The Associated Press.

Kanye West abandoned his prescribed statement during an American Red Cross telethon to utter "George Bush does not care about black people" to a national audience. We aren't analyzing whether what West said was right or wrong; the issue is this: Political criticism is acting as a metaphorical sidecar to even the most charitable acts.

A man known by his livejournal handle as "Interdictor" has gained fame as he has been updating his Web log from a high-rise in New Orleans. Using a diesel-powered generator and his laptop computer, the man has provided insight into how the city is faring by posting multiple times per hour.

An excerpt from one post reads "Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. We are already instituting our own rules and guidelines for hygiene, personal behavior, etc. Effective use of time NOW is critical. Problems need to be dealt with before they exist, because they will exist and you don't want to have critical situations occur when you're dealing with something else."

Every second that is wasted by finding a face to place blame is another second that corpses are rotting, bacteria is multiplying and gun-toting citizens are looting and shooting at cops.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told the AP 10,000 people may be dead in his city alone. Can't we put the blaming and finger-pointing on hold until we can keep the death toll from rising higher?

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