Achieving Happiness

I wonder what Truman Capote would have said or written if he were alive today and he knew what had happened to his beloved New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the shameful, despicable neglect of the George W. Bush government?

In his stories and non-fiction pieces (such as Hidden Gardens in his Music for Chameleons  collection), Capote describes the beguiling, seductive mystery of New Orleans and the warmth of its people (and their occasional strangeness, a luminous kind of darkness). He built paragraphs around old buildings, statuary, mint julep. He confided how he never really liked Mardi Gras (or its equivalent the carnivale in Martinique), and all the many small things he did like about growing up in New Orleans and the South.

One year after  Katrina, New Orleans is still a long way off from recovering. The devastation wrought by the killer hurricane is still very much felt by the scarred-for-life residents. They were the victims of nature’s wrtah, true; but more than that, they were victims of their government’s inefficiency and perhaps even callous and deliberate neglect of the survivors.

Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and submerged 80% of New Orleans under water. A year later, there are so many news reports stating that the survivors who were not as lucky as others who had the option to relocate and start again somewhere else (or those who really did not have any other place to go and didn’t want to go even if they had options) live a little more welloff than vagrants: hundreds are still waiting for the mobile homes they were promised by the federal government.

Bush sent so many of American troops to Iraq and Afghanistan that he didn’t have any to order to conduct immediate relief operations when Katrina struck last year. Many died long before the water, medicine and food came.

Spike Lee has come out with a film about the disaster and its aftermath. In it, his message is perfectly clear: political leaders failed to respond immediately to minimize the damage of the hurricane and severely cut down on the loss of life and property. Instead of getting down to work, Governor Blanco was determined to look and appear in control of the situation more than she actually was. As for Bush, he was thinking more in terms of holding fundraisers (and not shelling out actual funds from government coffers) and debating about state rights, accountability and responsibility than he did about the situation in New Orleans. He should have taken action even if it meant preempting Blanco.

Hay naku. The humanity. Americans should remember Katrina and New Orleans (if they can’t stand completely united about Iraq)  and make sure that Bush does not get another four years to wreak more devastation on America and against the rest of the world.

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Now what about the Guimaras oil slick?

Ang solusyong buhok at balahibo ng gobyernong Macapagal-Arroyo…

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