The High Court

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The Battle of New Orleans

September 7, 2005

 

Mike Brown, your bus is here.   But you won’t be riding on the bus; you will be thrown under it.  Brown, the man with the common name and uncommon responsibility of being the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will be assigned a new position as the number one scapegoat for the tragedy in the Gulf South, particularly for the chaos in New Orleans.  After internal memos from Brown to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff were made public, revealing that Brown had waited hours after Katrina hit land to request the dispatch of 1,000 Homeland Security employees to the Gulf South (giving them two days to arrive), it is now a matter of when, and not if, Brown loses his job.

 

And frankly, that stinks.  Maybe Brown deserves to lose his job.  But for him to become the face of failure in this tragedy is ridiculous.  Were Brown and FEMA caught totally unprepared for a disaster of this type and magnitude?  Obviously.  Were they guilty of incompetence or negligence?  That would be more difficult to say.  But neither FEMA nor President Bush created this situation.  For that, we would have to thank Mother Nature and good old-fashioned human arrogance.  That’s right.  Human arrogance.  We always think we can tame nature.  You put a city between a lake, a river, and the Gulf of Mexico.  Mix in volatile weather.  And you do the math.  The unspeakable horror that has been unleashed on the Gulf South in general and New Orleans in particular is no one person’s fault.  This is the world we live in; these are the chances we sometimes take.

 

I do not mean to sound callous.  I care deeply for the lives that have been irreparably damaged.  I mourn the lives that have been lost.  And I hope and pray that every living survivor might soon find some kind of peace and prosperity.  I can scarcely imagine the pain and anguish each victim has endured.  But now is the time for healing.  Now is the time for repairing and rebuilding.  It is not the time to look to affix blame for a natural disaster.  Do we need to learn from mistakes that have been made and from the efforts that have been successful?  Yes, we most certainly do.  And we have to keep focus on this fact:  Someday, the terrible developments of this storm will save the lives of thousands of others.  We will learn from this and go forward a wiser nation.

 

So for all of the wailing blame-gamers, shut your mouths.  If you are like me…safe, dry, cool…with all of your family and belongings in place…then turn your attention to helping these people.  We heard you the first time:  The relief and rescue effort did not come fast enough or efficiently enough.  We get it.  But you remember this if you can’t manage to stifle your nonsense:  Careful how you state your criticisms.  You be careful that when you criticize, you also praise the thousands of volunteers who have worked themselves to exhaustion trying to save lives.  Countless numbers of Americans have opened their homes, their hearts, and their checkbooks to try and provide some sort of aid and comfort to these displaced victims.  And you remember that every single time you make a broad generalization about the disgraceful emergency response, you are slapping each one of the selfless relief workers on the ground in the Gulf South right in the face. 

 

And let me offer you another suggestion while I am loaded with them:  Careful how you criticize your President.  I am not here as a spin doctor or Bush apologist (I have some criticisms for him, too).  But there has been a disturbing deterioration of respect for the office.  I have seen some comparisons of the President’s leadership now versus his leadership following 9/11.  Most critiques have suggested that the quality of his leadership and the compassion that he has shown was far substandard to what we saw from him four years ago.  I say hogwash.  The President is the same compassionate and caring man he has always been.  I would be the first to tell you that the man has his faults, but failing to care for his citizens is not one of them.  Short of rowing his own rescue boat (and I don’t believe the Secret Service would have gone for that), there is little more the President could have done.  If you hold the position that the federal government’s response was poor, and you want to hold President Bush responsible for that, fine.  That’s his job.  As Harry Truman said, the buck stops there.  He’s a big boy.  He knows it comes with the territory.  But nobody has any business criticizing how he cares about the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  Nor should he have to listen to the kind of crap that came spewing out of the mouth of noted political and social scholar Kanye West who suggested that the President didn’t care about black people.  Nice job, Kanye.  What an informed and reasoned opinion.  Sometimes freedom of speech is a doctrine with its own faults…

 

While we are here, it would be opportune to mention the organizations that fanned the flames of displeasure across the nation:  cable news outlets.  Yes, that’s you CNN and Fox News.  The worldwide leaders in garbage.  While I admire the efforts of reporters, cameramen, and producers that have soldiered through trying to help folks on the ground (although I often wonder if we are looking at career-driven decisions…I would feel better if I knew Geraldo also rescued people off-camera), I am thoroughly disgusted by the inane commentary offered by the in-studio anchors on each news network.  Without pause, they offered constant criticism concerning the response of government agencies.  Forgetting, I suppose, that their cameras brought us pictures of people having a cold beer down on Bourbon Street in celebration of the worst of Katrina passing them by.  My question, of course is this:  If the news networks were so damn smart, why didn’t they tell everybody left in New Orleans to get out on Monday night before the levees started breaking?  Anybody?  Anybody?  Maybe they could have told FEMA to get it in gear if they had the forecast on the situation.  How about you, Nancy Grace?  Bill O’Reilly?  No?  And this is the problem with the so-called news outlets.  It isn’t as though they have anything other than self-aggrandizing armchair emergency directors on their networks.  They should call themselves the soap opera channel thanks to the pure drivel that unfolds on a nightly basis.  The news?  They think they are the news.  News just didn’t happen, it happened during Nancy Grace.  Welcome to the no-spin zone?  O’Reilly has a spin.  The spin of a party…a party of one.  Him.  The O’Reilly Factor?  His bank balance.  These are the geniuses disseminating important events for you.  Real responsible journalism, guys.  Nice work.

 

I would be remiss in my rant if I didn’t finish with politicians.  Because here they come, out of the woodwork, trying to assess blame to one party or deflect it from another.  And I really can’t think of anything sleazier than trying to raise political capital out of a disaster of this magnitude.  I mean, how big of a scumbag could you be?  Really?  But you can rest assured, because it will happen.  And here are three items that will make certain it does:  With Chief Justice Rehnquist’s passing, there are now two Supreme Court spots open for a conservative President to fill.  The Democrats will try and use the Katrina aftermath to make certain that at least one of the slots is filled by a centrist judge.  There is no way they will allow two conservative justices on the bench, which would then lean the high court to the right.  Number two is the war in Iraq.  Surely you hadn’t forgotten our men and women fighting to gain stability there.  It will only be a matter of seconds before Democrats in Congress are bemoaning the money and resources being used in Iraq that should be used to rebuild the Gulf Coast.  And third, and most importantly to politicians on both sides…upcoming elections.  The Democrats will be hoping to gain control of Congress in 2006 and 2008, and of course will be hoping to reclaim the Oval Office in ’08.  The Republicans, in turn, will be hoping to hold onto both.

 

Isn’t the partisan politics a joy?  An entire region of our country destroyed and displaced, and our elected officials will eventually choose to make it a battleground for votes.  Classy.  I watched Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD) make an eloquent and impassioned plea for a quicker response in New Orleans last Friday.  It was a wonderful speech, right up until the point where he called out ‘Compassionate Conservatives’ and mocked the President by quoting scripture to him (Matthew 25:35-40) and suggesting to him that, “God cannot be pleased.”  Well…maybe not, Elijah.  But I can quote scripture too (although I will refrain), and I am pretty sure that God is not amused at being invoked in such a disrespectful manner.  He would probably rather Rep. Cummings found another pawn to use in his political game. 

 

And as I mentioned, I do have criticisms for the President.  I do not know the man, but I do have a fondness for him.  I have voted for him twice, and I do believe he is a good man.  That does not stop me from evaluating his performance honestly, and I am often critical of some of the moves his administration makes to spin things in their favor.  I suspect much of that is the doing of political strategist extraordinaire Karl Rove, but the President is a grown man, and I expect him to be accountable for everything he says and does.  My biggest issue with his handling of the storm response has been the way he has treated it as a delicate political situation.  He and his advisors have seemed acutely aware of the criticism he was going to face, and they have gone out of their way to tiptoe around it.  As a second-term President, I would prefer he drop the political niceties and simply be presidential.  I realize that as President he is also the head of the Republican Party and always casts a wary eye on the future ramifications for the Party with each of his decisions.  But in this situation, I could give a damn about the Republican Party.  I want what is best for the American people hurt by these tragic circumstances.

 

I want the President to come out and speak from the heart.  I want him to fully express his feelings about what has gone on across the Gulf Coast, with emphasis on the chaos in New Orleans.  And I want him to put the hammer down on his critics, in the media and on Capitol Hill.  Eventually, enough is enough.  There will be no better time to remind everyone that his office is the highest in the land.  We turned down a King once, but in times of turmoil, we require our executive branch to act with all of the power the law allows.  President Bush is a good man and a compassionate leader.  Whether you voted for him or not, he is our leader.  It is my wish that he would borrow a line from the movie, The American President.  In one of the climactic scenes of the film, fictional President Andrew Shepherd responds to a rival with the following, “My name is Andrew Shepherd, and I AM the President.”  I hope George W. Bush will remind the nation of the fact that he IS our President, and I hope the nation responds with support.

 

One last thing has really bothered me about the commentary we have heard over the last week.  The issue of race.  I am not fool enough to think that race is not an issue for people of color in this country every day.  I know that it is.  And as a white male, I am ill-qualified to speak about it knowledgeably.  So I will not.  But what I do want to say is this:  I do not believe for a second that this tragedy was affected by the color of people’s skin.  Certainly, Hurricane Katrina was color-blind.  We know that pain and suffering have always been equal-opportunity offenders.  I cannot imagine that there is one official involved in the relief effort that would have made a decision based on the skin color of the majority of the people trapped in New Orleans.

 

What I do believe mattered in New Orleans (and many other afflicted areas on the Gulf Coast) is poverty.  Regardless of color or ethnicity, it was the poor who were hit the hardest.  And they always are, in any tragedy.  When tragedy happens around the world, it is the poor who bear the brunt of the pain and suffering, regardless of the location on the globe.  We find it unimaginable that such scenarios could play out in America, and we have compared the images to that of a third-world country.  Well, keep in mind what you really mean most of the time when you refer to a third-world country…you mean poor.  Now everyday, right here in our own country, the poverty-stricken have been front and center in our living rooms every day.  For most of us, that isn’t something we see often.  But you keep in mind that most of those people were poor before Katrina hit.  And you didn’t care.  But you will now.  You better now.

 

Remember Mike Brown?  He had no way to know things would unfold as they did.  None of us did.  And yes, it is FEMA’s job to be prepared for the worst.  But how do you prepare for the worst?  Isn’t that impossible?  You just try to do the best you can.  But nobody in modern history had seen a major metropolitan area nearly completely submerged in water.  Coordinating the relief effort would not have been simple or easy under the best of circumstances.  It doesn’t excuse a sluggish relief effort; it is simply understandable.  This is something we must learn from, and we will. I know that officials in Mississippi and Louisiana are terribly upset.  I know that so many citizens of the affected areas are outraged.  I have no quarrel with the displeasure they have expressed. But for those of us outside the Gulf Coast, nobody will be helped by us running around trying to affix blame.  Let’s keep that in mind.

 

I continue to keep the victims of Katrina in my thoughts and prayers.  I hope for a speedy recovery for the entire region.  But no amount of platitudes will piece back cities and lives.  That will take time.  And hope.  And faith.  And it will take men and women of strength and resolve.  So with that notion, I leave it to one of my new favorite people, Lt. General Russel Honore (a Louisiana native with family still in the area), commander of the National Guard forces in New Orleans to sum up.  “The storm did this.  It wasn’t anything the government did.  The storm had the damn vote.  You can’t vote the water out of New Orleans.  Now let’s take care of the evacuees!  Let’s get it on!  Over!”

 

General, I couldn’t have said it better myself.  Over!

 

 

 

Contact The Chief Justice at chiefjustice@thehighcourtofsports.com.

 

 

 

 

The Chief Justice urges all of his readers to give what they can to assist the relief effort for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  You can make a donation by going to www.redcross.org.