The Blame

"No, of course what really matters

Is the blame,

Somebody to blame."

Since the majority of individuals in this roundish world of ours will spend significant portions of their lives trying to avoid beling blamed for their own screw ups, I find it interesting that they are so quick to place blame on other people. If we were half as quick at responding to emergency situations as we are go assign blame when the shit hits the fan then perhaps 80,000 people wouldn't have spent last week trapped in New Orleans.

Maybe what really needs to be happening right now and as the south begins its recovery is a gathering of information about what happend. For instance this timeline at Think Progress is a start (though a VERY biased start) at getting a picture of what happend during the crisis. It would also be interesting to get as much information as possible from first responders and journalists who were on the scene. And perhaps to talk to refugees about what happend. But please note, I said Information, by this I mean facts. Like it is a fact that the Governer of Louisiana declared a state of emergency on Friday August, 26th. So on and so forth. And from there we can try to peice together an accurate picture of what happend.

I think this would be an interesting blog project to start, gathering as much information as possible and maybe getting a group of academics to conduct their own investigation. (Since any investigation by the government is likely to be political... what? politicians political?) Maybe someone who gets more than 2 hits a day could do this.

While it would be really fun to fire a bunch of people , It probably wont prevent the same thing from happening again in 6 months. What having this information could do is help us find out where emergency plans failed, where communications broke down, and to find out a way to make sure that this doesn't happen again. Where does there need to be redundancy to ensure that our officials aren't wandering lost in the dark? How many reservists need to be on American soil in case of a similar incident? How can we get food/water and other necessities to stranded people?

But what I really hope comes of this situation, is that at some point Americans wake up and begin electing real leaders who have the best interests of the country in mind, and who can make tough decisions and take care of the people.

But, we all know that wont happen.