Reply #1: WOW! She absolutely NAILS it! [View All]

[Lindacooks]

I love the last few paragraphs:

"Beyond the basics of food and shelter, and a competent governmental response, the people of New Orleans also were in want of perhaps the most important capital in the currency of recovery: hope.

"You bring us hope," Grand Forks Mayor Pat Owens tearfully told President Clinton at a press conference soon after the dikes were overtopped.

<snip>

Compare these words to Bush's comments upon landing in New Orleans, where a disaster of unimaginable proportions had just occurred, where bodies lay rotting outside the convention center because aid had not reached them in time: He joked about his visits to New Orleans during his alcoholic days when he had "sometimes too much" fun in the French Quarter. Dennis Hastert chose to comment publicly on his belief that much of New Orleans would be "bulldozed." Rep. Richard Baker, of Baton Rouge, was reported by the Wall Street Journal to have said to lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

<snip>

Why did Grand Forks deserve a better response to a catastrophic natural event than New Orleans? Some may argue that Grand Forks' largely white population may have something to do with it, and perhaps it does. But I think the more likely answer is that the administration in charge of the federal government in 1997, for all its faults, was not only better equipped to deal with a natural disaster; it was also a team that felt, at core, a fundamental empathy for American citizens who had lost everything through no fault of their own. The dearth of such empathy in the current administration -- one in which the president refuses to attend military funerals resulting from a war he started -- is chilling and, ultimately, telling."