The shame of a nation

A year after Katrina struck the southern USA and New Orleans in particular, one can only conclude that almost no progress has been made rebuilding the hurricane struck city. The situation is still very bad. Indeed, one could say that one year after Katrina, New Orleans is the shame of a nation. The shame of a "super-power" that tries to justify pumping billions and billions into a war on the other side of the world, killing thousands in the name of 'democracy' and 'progress', but being utterly impotent and powerless at home when dealing with disaster. Millions of dollars disapeared into the back pockets of frauds or got wasted on the wrong stuff.

Still, Bush had the guts when he revisted the area to state he was seeing "a lot of progress". The thing was: he was visiting a rich, white neighboorhood. A couple of miles down the block he would have been standing on the same rubble and pile of debris that where there a year ago: in black neigboorhoods with the poor people.

Having witnessed the destruction first hand when me and my girlfriend Carrie made the mistake to visit Biloxi last Christmas, I can really say there are no words for the how bad it must be to people who live(d) there. Those who stayed or returned face a whole world of trouble. As Time Magazine reports:

Call it "Katrina stress" or the "Katrina funk", but it's all too real — and it has real implications for the future health of the city. While the physical devastation of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina has been well documented, the psychic toll is just becoming clear. The suicide rate has nearly tripled, depression is common, domestic abuse is on the rise, and self-medicating with booze is a favored method of forgetting.

Worse yet, the mental health care system needed to help deal with all this is in ruins. Private psychologists and psychiatrists are almost impossible to find. Emergency rooms outside New Orleans — those that survived the storm — are now packed with people from the city seeking mental health care. It's not just the pre-Katrina schizophrenics and crazies who have gone without meds for the year, but regular people who are stressed and depressed. "Life is just not easy in the Big Easy now," says Buras. "There's a lot of anxiety and deep depression."

The figures speak for themselves: half the population of New Orleans is still living somewhere else, over 60% of all the schools are still closed and only half the hospitals are open again. As always with bad situations, people are using humor to cope with everything. CNN reports that when you go downtown people are selling T-shirt with some funny texts:

"Make levees, not war," read one. Another: "FEMA evacuation plan: Run, motherfucker, run." And in a shot at the New Orleans police, some of whom were accused of abandoning their posts during the disaster: "NOPD: Not our problem dude."

In the meantime Florida gets the rain from tropical storm Ernesto. It's Nature's way of showing us there is just one real super-power in this world.