Well, it turns out my brother had my current Translators professor, about 10 years ago. This translator guy is neat. Why, you ask? Well, lemme tell ya.

He moved here from Venezuela, allegedly to get away from an impotent government that didn't have the mindset to help its own people, and away from a culture which did not expect to be treated fairly. What does that mean? Well...

Today he was angry. He told us this himself, and he apologized for something that he'd done in another class before us, which was to swear (Fuck!) in front of his entire class. First time in 20 years of teaching here that he'd done it, if you believe him. But he was angry over the New Orleans disaster, because of how the administration handled it.

"Didn't they watch the PBS special about New Orleans flooding if those levees broke?" He exclaimed animatedly, which is very unusual. He's a very laid back kind of guy. "If those levees break, the city becomes uninhabitable for the next six months. You've got a city filled with way over a million people, and many of them are poor. It will take you 72 hours to evacuate them, because in the first 24 hours everybody with cars is gone, and the next two days are spent dragging people off forcibly and shipping them somewhere else because they can't or won't drive off themselves. I knew this, and I'm nobody!

"I don't live there. None of my friends or relatives live there. And yet a week ago, I see a hurricane bearing down on New Orleans which is category 3, and the water temperature's 90 degrees all the way up to the coast. This is not rocket science! The order to evacuate should have been given earlier; the moment they saw it lined up to hit New Orleans, Cat 3 or Cat 5."

With any luck, someone's going to be held responsible for the failure to evacuate in time. A lot of someones. It was somebody's responsibility to keep the city's people safe, and they didn't do their job. Probably the Mayor's, who's been doing everything he can to make it look like he's busy and has accomplished surprisingly little, given that the storm landed a week and 10 hours ago.

Hopefully Bush catches some of the fire, as well. Martial Law was declared, you hear on the news. Was it? If martial law was declared so long ago, why wasn't there a military presence taking control of the city? That's what Martial Law means, the Military Takes Over. Why weren't troops and helicopters and supplies standing by, why is it only in the last two days that they've been effective at all? We swept through Baghdad faster than we got to New Orleans. I hear an aircraft carrier was being brought in to help, but had to travel all the way across the ocean to get to New Orleans. So did the hurricane.

And the reason why this troubles me, and should trouble everybody, is because New Orleans has known that they have a problem. Their city is below sea level. They knew how far everything was going to flood, and that 80% of the city would be underwater. We all believe that our government is intent on keeping us safe, but are they? What if California has the same problem when the next big earthquake hits? What if Oregon has a problem when an 'inactive' volcano erupts, a la Mountt St. Helens. We assume that these things are being monitored, controlled, that contingencies have been established and somebody knows what to do when the disaster they planned for happens.


In Florida this year, in the wake of Hurricane Francis, many buildings are being built without being inspected for compliance to code. I know this because I talked to my neighbor, who is a contractor. The county isn't checking the buildings he's working on, and they didn't come out to inspect the new roof on his house either. Instead, they had a piece of paper from the county pre-approving all their work. Pre-approving all their work. Because there's so much construction, the county isn't bothering to do the inspections that have to be done by law, to make sure that roofs stay on and buildings don't blow over in the wind and kill people living there. The same thing will happen in New Orleans, too. Guess what that means, when the next big storm rolls through?

My professor from Venezuela was beyond furious today, as we talked because he couldn't get the computer to output through the overhead projector for the first 40 minutes of class. "This kind of behavior is the reason why I left Venezuela with one wife and two suitcases to my name."