On Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina brought out the best and worst in people. The worst: the Federal Emergency Management agency and the Bush Administration in their preparation for this expected disaster. FEMA is a multimillion-dollar federal agency with nothing to do but plan for disasters. But though it had experience with trying to evacuate New Orleans before, though it had 48 hours of warning that they would need to do it again, they had no plan to save the city's poor. As a result 50,000 people who thought they had been rescued found themselves without food and water for five days before the federal government realized there was a problem. Turns out the FEMA, as a part of Bush's new Homeland Security department, has been run by people whose only experience has been in promotion and image-making. And as had been often warned before, the National Guard was unprepared, because most of their manpower and most of their equipment was overseas fighting a war in a foreign land.

The worst: the oil industry, which seized upon the opportunity to double the price of gas and make a killing off this tragedy. Can anyone explain why the price of gas rose hourly, though the damage from the storm was weeks away from impacting supplies? Couldn't these corporate fat-cats have forgone their profits for a few days, while the rest of the nation wept over this tragedy?

The best: the Douglas administration and the people of Vermont. When it became clear that the federal government wasn't doing its job, Governor Douglas sent the state police to go halfway across the nation to escort relief supplies, and he called upon the People of Vermont to donate the supplies. The word quickly spread, and within hours grocery stores were packed, registers were ringing as fast as they could, shelves were emptied as the people of Vermont emptied their pockets. I almost wept seeing the mounds of goods piling up on the Statehouse lawn, seeing this sudden outpouring of help. In twenty-four hours, a state no bigger than the city it was helping had sent 10 tractor-trailer trucks filled to the brim. I am so proud to be a Vermonter.

Governor Douglas also illustrated how easy it would have been to provide relief to the New Orleans when the people needed to get: the day after the storm. If our president had cared that 50,000 poor black lives at stake, and had gone on television pleading for buses, bulldozers to clear roads, whatever was needed, New Orleans would have been overwhelmed with volunteers and the problem would have resolved itself. Instead he waited a criminal five days and thousands of people died. Five days. Lance Armstrong could have bicycled from Washington to New Orleans in five days, but the president couldn't get some buses there.