Escape from New Orleans

by Casey Flynn (9/1/05)

I guess I'm starting to understand why the Bush administration was and is having such a hard time stopping the first looting, lawlessness, and later insurgency in Iraq. If you can't stop lawlessness and looting in a place affectionately called, 'The Big Easy,' located in our own backyard what are the chances that you're going to stop looting, lawlessness and an insurgency in a place called, 'The Sunni Triangle of Death.'

The situation in New Orleans has gotten so bad that the Iraqi Provisional Government and President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela have offered to help.

Fortunately, help is on its way. The Louisiana National Guard has received orders to be transferred to New Orleans. Already they are three hours outside of Fallujah and well on their way to getting back to New Orleans.

In the last few days, new stories have focused on the scene of individuals looting a Wal-Mart and the reporters have decried with utmost indignation the looting of this Wal-Mart that took place hours before it was inundated with bacteria-ridden floodwaters. Proving once again that people in this country would rather see goods and products be destroyed by Mother Nature than going to poor people who never paid for them.

Wal-Mart has offered $17 million in relief for the flood victims in New Orleans. They are taking this money from the hundreds of millions of dollars that Wal-Mart makes by (1) not paying its employees overtime as required by law or by pressuring employees to work hours that were not recorded or paid; (2) hiring elderly people, who already have Medicare benefits, so they don't have to offer health insurance, et al..

Meanwhile, the real story of the New Orleans disaster was that it appears very little work was being done on the broken levees the first few critical days after Hurricane Katrina. I watched a cable news show as an official working on the broken levees stated that they were going to give up for the night. Apparently it was just passed everyone's bedtime. In college, I worked as a security guard guarding student dorms on an entirely safe college campus; nevertheless, we ran a third shift through the night. Was there really no one for a third shift? This is a nation of 270 million people - surely there are some civil engineers who are 'night people.' The next day I heard, according to a local New Orleans news station, that no work was being done on the broken levees for several hours in the afternoon.

Fortunately the powers to be finally got together and came up with a plan to stop the flooding waters from coming into New Orleans -- have the water in New Orleans be at the same level as Lake Pontchartrain.

I'm not foreclosing the possibility that perhaps this was truly an impossible situation. But

I would just like to point out that one night when my toilet was overflowing with water and the water was gathering on the bathroom floor, I didn't just try one or two things and call it a night. No, I kept working through the night, and I was just renting the freakin' place.

Tonight -Thursday, September 1, the nightmare in New Orleans inexplicably worsens as armed vigilantes are about the streets; corpses fester in the open; families in the ominous shadow of the Superdome (now essentially an open sewer) are frightened, hysterical and hungry, and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin put out 'a desperate SOS.' To this grave situation, a member of the Bush administration - when asked whether enough troops and resources were being employed in New Orleans - took a page out of the Rumsfeld playbook and said, 'Yes, there was enough troops and resources.'