LESSONS FROM KATRINA: When America's President Turned His Back On Americans...

"This didn't feel like the United States; this didn't feel like home..." - NBC News Anchor Brian Williams, reporting from New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
Editor of The Tribune

McALLEN, Texas - Five years ago this week, on Aug. 29, 2005, the United States got its chance to look inward after a major disaster. Thousands stood displaced, injured and left to fend for food & water after Huricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, flooding the Louisiana city and creating a mess so massive that only the federal government had the capacity to respond. Water and food eventually came from locals, but scenes captured by television news crews told of cold-hearted abandonment.

Blame quickly fell on President George W. Bush. Never a man at ease around poverty or someone else's needs, Bush was slow to roll the government's gear and aid forces. His initial idea was to fly-over the devastation aboard Air Force One (see photo). To this day, it remains a black mark on his presidency. This is the week that television - local, network and HBO - will return to the days and weeks after Katrina, to recall a time in America when the country let its own down. It is a clearcut example of shame and of that tenet among some in the country that the poor will always have to do for themselves. Much of the criticism rested with a commonly-held belief that New Orleans, being a city inhabited by a dominant African-American population, had been ignored because of race. Had the hurricane struck, say, Pensacola on the Florida Panhandle to the east, well, things would have been very different.

As weird as it sounds, there are those who say the country's response is dictated by exactly which of its citizens are victimized. George W. Bush being a Republican had much to do with the government's failure, critics charged. And so images sailed across television screens, images of children perspiring in the oppressive late-August heat and humidity, of the elderly left on sidewalks with medication notes on sheets of paper stapled to their clothing, of roaming police officers telling residents help was on its way, but that help was not the police department, of an overflowing Louisiana Superdome filled to the rim with families, many of them begging for water, scenes of despair all over the spacious stadium floor.

Katrina tested this country, and this country failed royally.

The country has suffered other calamities. Earthquakes in San Francisco and Galveston killed thousands, but those came early last century, when the nation did not have the resources it had when Katrina landed its powerful blow. No, this time, the government had the National Guard and its modern equipment that included helicopters. It had emergency mobile homes. It had military airplanes that could've dropped food & water in the hours after the hurricane moved through New Orleans. It had the capacity to help, and to help fast.

It didn't.

And that, then, is what the news media will broadcast all this coming week. It will not be a good day for the federal government, for a number of federal emergency response agencies, for a slew of so-called charity organizations that mine for donations, but rarely come through with equal vigor when needed.

But it will be worse for George W. Bush.

He failed miserably, and he absolutely knows it - like his country knows it...

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