Being Naive

It's not supposed to happen here. You see on the news quite frequently how natural disasters devastate regions of other countries, leaving hundreds or thousands dead. Call it arrogance, but many of us chalk it up to the fact that those countries are unprepared to deal with those disasters. Their infrastructure is not set up to adequately set up to handle such catastrophes, we think. In America in 2005, we have the resources to protect the people of our country from natural disasters or at least minimize the casualties which very rarely reach triple digits. Or, so we thought. I felt a strange feeling last night as I watched the aerial shots of the city of New Orleans. It was a lot like sadness, a little like shock but it was a lot closer still to...Anger. I want to believe that we are all safe simply because we live in this great country and that we are better prepared by leaps and bounds than the rest of the world for anything mother nature can dish out.

Then reality called... It wanted to have a word with me.

We are as susceptible to natural disasters as everyone else. I was angry that there were hordes of people trying to get on busses out of town. I was angry that even the people that deal with emergencies for a living were basically rendered helpless. I was angry that it was happening and little could be done to stop the suffering. What always amazed me about America is in our response. We have the American Red Cross, we have FEMA, we have the National Guard and we should be able to save almost everybody. Right? Now I see images of people stranded on rooftops, wading down city streets in shoulder height water, and (most disgustingly) people looting flooded stores.

Not that efforts have not been made to help people affected by this devastating storm, it's just that we came up against something that was just too big. Estimates are that at least one thousand people are dead, there has been millions, if not billions of dollars in damage and the storm contributed gas prices shooting up to European-ly high levels.

There will be talk in the months ahead about how things could have been handled differently, how we could have been more prepared, how we need to have the government do something so that this doesn't happen again. The bottom line is: Sometimes the awesome power of nature is just to much for even the strongest nations.

Time to wake up, Nate.