Put your fingers away

I am tired of the blame. I'm tired of turning on the news and seeing angry politicians and talking heads blaming President Bush, racial prejudice, and anything else but Mother Nature for the destruction that has been wrought upon our Gulf Coast. Has the response to this disaster been seamless and perfectly executed? No. Has it been done to the best of the ability of those involved? Dear God I would like to believe so.

Maybe I'm naive (in fact I'm quite sure I am), but I truly believe that people are responding as best they can. I can't even begin to imagine the logistics involved in getting the supplies and rescue personnel to an area that has been devastated the way that New Orleans and the surrounding areas have been. You can't just shuttle countless troops to the area without considering and planning for how they will be housed, fed, kept safe. You can't drop supplies from helicopters into flood waters below and hope that people are able to get them. Clearly the system hasn't worked nearly as well as it should have in this instance, but I don't believe that systemic failure can be attributed to people not wanting and/or not trying to do the best they can under the circumstances. Yes, the response has been unacceptable (even the President agrees with that), but to attempt to lay the blame for that at the feet of a few individuals is equally unacceptable.

I weep at coverage from the area showing people suffering, babies so dehydrated they can barely keep their eyes open, people who have nothing left but the clothes on their backs and, if they're fortunate, their loved ones. My heart breaks at the faces, the stories, the pictures. But my blood boils at the blame. My blood boils at Kanye West saying that George Bush "doesn't care about black people" (which he just said on the NBC relief concert that is airing as I write this). Right now pointing fingers helps nobody. There will be plenty of time in the weeks and months to come to convene special congressional committees which will spend millions of dollars investigating why the federal government was so slow in responding to this catastrophe, why the levee system in New Orleans failed, and countless related issues. There will (hopefully) be plenty of time to improve the emergency response system so, God forbid, the next time disaster strikes we will be better prepared to respond. It's easy to look at this situation from a thousand miles away and point out all the screw ups and snafus, all the things that we should have, would have, could have done differently, done better. But the fact of the matter is that serves no purpose right now. Put your fingers in your wallets and donate money, put your fingers together and pray to God for these poor people, but put your fingers away if all you can do is point. When the dust settles and the flood waters recede there will be enough blame to go around. For now the only name that should have any blame associated to it is Katrina.