Katrina

    What a mess… Rick and I watched the weather
channel the night before the hurricane hit. They interviewed some
people in Biloxi who were going to ride out the storm and we joked
about Katrina weeding out the gene pool in Mississippi. Sure was a lot
funnier when they were alive… I do hope that when people are rescued
from coastal devastation that the coast guard gives them a hearty “YOU
FUCKING MORON! You had 36 hours of notice that a category 5 hurricane
was headed towards you. Good thing you stuck around huh?” I realize
that some people along the coast had extenuating circumstances and
couldn’t leave, but most could have. Many of the residents of New
Orleans are just  too poor to go anywhere, but surely they could
have gone down to the Superdome, or at least higher ground. It’s
terrifying to think of the number of people that drowned in their
attics…
    The question that should come up is should New
Orleans be rebuilt? The result of this hurricane couldn’t have caught
anyone by surprise. A major metropolitan city that lies below sea level
and is surrounded by major bodies of water on three sides is never a
good idea. Not only was this completely predictable, but there is a
very real possibility of it happening any given year. Hell, it might
happen again next month. How many hundreds of billions of dollars will
it take to rebuild that city? I’m a little worried about the message
that it sends to people when they build in very dangerous places and
the federal government says, “Don’t worry, we’ll bail you out if
anything bad happens.” Don’t get me wrong, I think that if people want
to live and build in New Orleans they should, but they should also
insure against the inevitable in whatever way they can and not rely on
the rest of us to bail them out when they get flooded. Right now I think the government has a duty to rescue and get people out of harm’s way, but we gotta look at the future/
    Don’t worry, none of this will ever be mentioned.
Politicians are a spineless lot and none of them have the guts to even
voice this rather common sense question of whether or not this is a
good use of tax dollars. A great compromise would be subsidized loans,
make them responsible for paying for their own rebuilding. If they want
to live in an area that nature wants to be a swamp and/or a lake, have
at it, but you gotta pay for it yourself…

Isaac