The ship floats but it won't float away*

Beginning around 11:30 today I started to play a little game with myself where I'd try to approximate the progress of our evacuation four years ago by posting to Twitter a guess at where we would have been at the time of each update. I gave up on it around 3:00 or so because 1) I had other stuff to do today and 2) It forced me to recall that by that time were still sitting in traffic on or near the (old) twin-spans.

In fact as I type this now I realize that we would have still been at or near Meridian, Mississippi where we searched in exhaustion and in vain for a place to stay. It wasn't until around 1:00 AM that we finally collapsed on a gym floor at a Red Cross shelter at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

I can still feel the cramp in my legs as I finally lay down on that mat next to a woman I had only known a few weeks at the time and who is now my wife. I'm struggling to remember exactly what I was thinking then. I was likely too beaten by the day to think anything more than, I'm tired, this is fucked, but we'll just figure it out as we go. At least that's a pretty good guess since it's more or less what I've been thinking every day since then.

Here are some links I noticed today.

• Four years on, Katrina remains cursed by rumour, cliche, lies and racism
  
  

  Katrina was a fairly terrible natural disaster.** But it turned into a horrific social catastrophe because of the response of the people in power, spurred on by their willingness to believe a hysterical, rumour-mongering media. (Journalists on the ground were often fiercely empathic and right on the mark, but those at a remove were all too willing to believe the usual tsunami of cliches about disaster and human nature.)
  
  The story that few can wrap their minds around is that ordinary people mostly behaved well – there were six bodies in the Superdome, including four natural deaths and a suicide, not the hundreds that the federal government expected when it sent massive refrigerator trucks to collect the corpses. On the other hand, people in power behaved appallingly, panicking, spreading rumours, and themselves showing an eagerness to kill and a pathological lack of empathy.

  
  
  **As most of us have screamed until bloody in the larynx, the Flood was a man-made disaster of starved wetlands and faulty engineering but we'll just have to live with the error here.



• Commentary: Does Obama care about New Orleans?
  

  President Obama, who has mainly limited his comments about New Orleans to feel-good boilerplate, did pledge to make good on President Bush's promise on that eerie, floodlit night in a deserted Jackson Square in 2005, to rebuild New Orleans better and stronger. But he has yet to actively intervene to make sure New Orleans gets state-of-the-art flood protection and robust and timely coastal wetland reconstruction. Like President Bush, President Obama so far seems to be acting as if just saying it makes it so.





• Katrina: Four Years and One Inauguration Later
  
  

  The president’s decision to stay on the east coast this week did not come as a surprise to the people of the Gulf Coast, where kudzu-covered playgrounds, closed schools and decaying roads inspire little trust in public officials. Yet even if predicted, the president’s absence still has managed to leave a bad taste in the mouths of many here who expected more from the country’s first black president, a former community organizer who campaigned on a promise that he would make it “clear to members of my administration that their responsibilities don’t end in places like the Ninth ward – they begin there.”




• EDITORIAL: We're Counting on You, Mr. President
  
  

  Our community is resilient and hard-working. Together with volunteers from around the country, we are striving to make this a better place than it was before the storm, with renovated houses, vastly improved schools and a unique culture that's as vibrant as ever.
  
  But there's no substitute for the focus, the energy, the commitment that a president alone can bestow. There's no substitute for you, as president, seeing our recovery and its halting progress with your own eyes, for taking time to walk in our shoes. So we ask you to bring your considerable intellect, your problem-solving ability, your influence to bear. When a president pays attention, so does the nation.
  
  In the past week, we have hosted several of your Cabinet secretaries. We are grateful for their visits. We were especially impressed with Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan. On this, his third visit since his appointment, he brought his entire senior team with him and committed himself to "building back not just what was there, but building back better and stronger."
  
  That was music to our ears. But it would be a sweeter sound coming from you and spoken on location.

(*)