Have you ever seen that commercial..the one with all the cute fuzzley little animals, and Sara Mclachlin is singing "In the Arms of an Angle" in the background? It always gets to me. Every time i see it, i have to go get my dog from his bed and bring him into my room because i feel bad that he has to sleep near the door. Corny yes, but i do it.
Recently i have been contemplating the condition of the USA..not so much the war in Iraq, we already get barraged with everything there is to know about that..mostly information i don't want to know..but in particular i've been thinking about New Orleans, and whats going on down there. As horrible as it may sound, I think that it was just the thing to talk about when it happened and now its old news. I mean, have you seen anything recent in the media to prove otherwise? I haven't, and if you have please let me know. For now, i would like to share a few facts with the people who read this, in hopes that it will spark some sort of discussion..hopefully along the lines of "what the hell are we doing?". So here it goes..
1) Hurricane Katrina was (is) the costliest disaster in the history of the USA
2) The vast majority of damage and deaths that occurred during hurricane were due to catastrophic flooding
3) Following the hurricane there were riots looting among the streets, no order was established until sometime after
4) Hurricane Katrina displaced more than 1.2 million citizens - they had no homes, they had no possessions. nothing. Out of the kindness of their hearts many Americans took complete strangers into their homes to help ease the loss. Still, many were left with nothing.
5) Three years later and still we have made very little progress to restore the once vibrant city that was New Orleans, as well as many other of the hard-hit cities.
6) The new levy system in place is set to break if another hurricane of Katrina magnitude were to happen again.
Obviously theres more to it than the 6 facts i posted, and you can do a quick Google search to read them - theres lots out there that mainstream media is ignoring. My hope is that if we start talking about it first, it will get our government rolling on the idea..its a long shot, but if it can make a difference then its worth it. I read somewhere that were spending 40 cents on every tax dollar to pay for the war in Iraq. Almost half of our money is going to protect our interests abroad...how much are we spending to protect our interests here?
