Rolling Plains Ramblings – “Our
Hearts Weep
© 8 Sep 05 – By Morton Scott Last week I talked to our young people about their future challenges and opportunities. Today I talk to us ALL - me, you - ALL of us – about challenges, opportunities, weeping hearts. We face, this month, this day, right now, the challenge to determine whether we, the people of the United States of America, can or should lead Earth into the future. This challenge is named Katrina. I know not a single person in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. Yet as I write this, I weep, I grieve, I am angry, I am frustrated. I am also determined. Katrina ithe worst natural disaster in American history. Katrina has probably killed over 20,000 of our countrymen. Our injured and diseased may exceed 100,000, our homeless evacuees exceed 400,000. Destruction far exceeds any other domestic disaster in our history, except the Civil War – and rivals it. After a week, and for months and years to come, the tragedies continue. Horribly, as yet unrescued Americans still suffer. As I write, many die. Survivors are injured, homeless, bewildered, shocked. Life for them has changed completely. They feel as if they are in a deep canyon, with sheer cliffs on either side, raging waters ahead and behind, trapped in uncertainty, bewildered. We will remember the man, yelling at another man laying on a New Orleans street “Live, Man! Live!” Terrified people frantically waving at a helicopter passing over. A daughter screaming that her mother needed medication and was dying. An elderly man, dead, alone, sitting in his battered wheel chair. This week the grim task goes on of sifting through horrendous debris, searching for week-old bodies, and more recent. We hear charges being hurled at FEMA, at President Bush, at almost anyone connected to Katrina. This is not the time to hurl those accusations. That will come. Then we must carefully probe problems about Katrina. This MUST be done, but carefully, thoroughly and calmly. We must. Finding fault is not the most important. Most important is finding out what went wrong and redesigning our response. The final death count is not yet available and won’t be for a long time. I estimate total deaths, in all three states, will be around 20,000. Total casualties, deaths and injuries, may exceed 100,000, more than any other week in our history. We must find out what happened. Then we must rebuild the Coast. We need New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson heeded the demands of our growing population along the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, who needed to ship their produce to New Orleans. Without New Orleans, our nation beyond the Appalachians was doomed. Napoleon Bonaparte startled American envoys by offering to sell the entire Louisiana territory. Without the Louisiana Purchase, we might have split into at least two nations, one between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, the other stretched along the East Coast. New Orleans made the United States a nation from coast-to-coast and eventually the greatest power in Earth’s History. How we recover from the Katrina tragedy will decide whether the United States of America is a great nation or a flicker in time. In the greatest natural disaster in American history – until last week, the Galveston hurricane in September 8, 1900 (105 years ago today), more than 5,000 were killed and Galveston was destroyed. The American Red Cross invented its disaster assistance program to deal with the Galveston tragedy. Galveston realized its government had not worked. The people of Galveston INVENTED a NEW type of government never before used anywhere – the professional city manager-council form, now used by thousands of cities across the nation. Galveston rebuilt itself and is a thriving urban area today. We must do this. This is all we can now do for the ten or twenty thousand who died last week. We owe it to them. If we do not, the United States of America will fade to a few pages in history books. It is up to us – to you and me. To those in Knox County, in Texas, in Oklahoma, across the nation from sea to shining(?) sea. Think about that this week, as we watch the horrifying scenes of thousands and thousands of bodies being pulled from attics, jumbled debris, shattered buildings, the remains of our hearts. Contact me at >fmortonscott@aol.com< I L B C N U
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