The Lasting Tragedy Is Our Short Attention Span

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It will be many months before the official white papers formally declare the reasons why New Orleans was wiped out the other week, but we can take a pretty good guess at this point. It was the decades-long determination by Washington’s legislators, bureaucrats and presidents that upgrading the city’s system of levees and canals wasn’t important enough and the threat not serious enough to provide the needed money for better protection.


When the scope of the disaster became clear, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was ill prepared because its budget had been slashed and its status undercut by the Department of Homeland Security. One former FEMA official told the Los Angeles Times that the place was being run by amateurs, a probably exaggerated assessment, although given the pictures we’ve been seeing, not by much.


In the 20/20 hindsight of catastrophe, these decisions would border on the criminal. Unfortunately, you can’t jail people for incompetence, so we’re left with lots of finger pointing and posturing. And here’s the most unsatisfying part: the kinds of decisions we saw play out in this mess are made all the time by people in government who lack the experience and the will to balance one priority against the next and then do the right thing.


We all play a role in this. Americans are present-tense people whose priorities focus on tangible and immediate needs. Our needs. In trying to get their levees worked on, the folks in New Orleans were competing with, among other things, a $223 million, mile-long bridge linking 50 residents on some island in Alaska to Ketchikan. To those 50 Alaskans, the bridge is a very big deal. And for a guy like Don Young, the Republican congressman from Alaska who brokered the pork, it’s a project that his constituents can see and benefit from as opposed to dirt piles next to a riverbank.


In the zero-sum budgeting game that gets played in Washington, the sight unseen loses out every time.


Should Young have deferred to the needs of Louisianans instead of his own people? That’s asking a lot of someone who must run for re-election every two years. If the rolls were reversed, would anyone expect Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu to give away available money? I kind of doubt it.


That’s where leadership comes in starting with an administration that looks at the needs of the entire country rather than any particular state or district. Along with leadership comes proportionality in this case, the recognition that fighting a no-win war in Iraq to justify our boneheaded invasion is probably not the best idea when that money takes away from important work at home.


Oh well. The tens of thousands of poor, aged and disabled who got stuck in New Orleans probably weren’t big supporters of President Bush anyway. And with more than a year before the mid-term Congressional elections, there’s still plenty of time to write out checks and rebuild. As horrible as the past two weeks have been, there are signs that many Americans want to move on. It happened after 9/11 and it will happen here.


But moving on also means not learning from the mistakes that were made. That’s the most worrisome epilogue to this.


Remember during the terrorist attacks, when emergency responders weren’t able to communicate with each other because everybody was operating on different frequencies? Everyone agreed this was an unacceptable situation, including the 9/11 commission. And yet, on this four-year anniversary of the attacks, little has changed. Repeated efforts have been made in Congress to create common frequencies for the cops and other emergency personnel, but somehow it hasn’t gotten through. That’s one of the reasons the folks in Louisiana had so much trouble communicating with each other after the storm.


Maybe that will change. The administration will be pouring some really big bucks into the recovery efforts and perhaps with all that money there will be a greater recognition of why it’s important to shore up the nation’s infrastructure, not only in Louisiana but in places like the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where a major earthquake could unleash massive devastation.


It’s not just money that’s required. If this calamity taught us anything, it’s that the Department of Homeland Security is its own disaster a massive conglomeration of departments and agencies that clearly aren’t working very well together. But how does Bush undo what he had been pushing so forcefully? And how do the pork-minded legislators finally recognize that there is more to their jobs than building bridges in their districts?


They haven’t a clue not yet anyway. And that could be the ultimate tragedy of Katrina.



*Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal. He can be heard every Tuesday morning at 6:55 and 9:55 on KPCC-FM (89.3).

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