I love Americans...

...but America is fucked up. I torrented spike lee's "when the levees broke" which tells the story about the Katrina Hurricane and how it affected New Orleans. The movie is made up of interviews and questions from people involved, and not some smarmy narration of one man's epic quest to solve the worlds problems (I'm looking at you Michael Moore). It also has hundreds of minutes of pictures and footage from the news at that time which were touching at the time, but presented in quick succession in this documentary take on a much larger feeling. The amount of devastation that took place there is worse than what any terrorist, or perhaps even group of terrorists could take place. A whole city was pretty much made into a biohazard and has since seen very little of the effort to rebuild. It is probably one of the worst things that we'd ever see. One of the worst things to ever happen on U.S. soil. And its an afterthought. The president has them turn the power on for his photo op and then lets them turn it right off. FEMA flies people all around the country to get them out of new orleans to escape the flood waters and don't offer to fly them back. The army corps of engineers were allowed to let the unsatisfactory levee system persist for years. The levees were the real problem, and that is the most disturbing part. it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that if a city is below sea level, a flood would be catastrophic. This should have been somthing done first. When the congress, the senate, the president, Lousiana, whoever, when they sit down with the revenue they should think "what is most important" No matter your politics, big government/small government, capitalist/socialist, social justice/aristocratic justice. No matter what it is you should be able to know Saint Louis is going to be safe before you do ANYTHING else. Instead people fall over themselves trying to pay back favors, sneak home money, Build weapons to attack our imaginary superpower enemies, shit i even think spending money on schools isn't worth it if the dams aren't strong enough, and I'm a teacher. The fact that it wasn' t taken care of means that, in my opinion, our government is really not working. Its problematic that it still isn't working, that the government is expecting the private sector to fix New Orleans, that there aren't options and opportunities arrising to repopulate the city, that the rebirth of this city in its entirety is barely a national issue. When I was a kid I remember hearing about New Orelans's altitude and thinking, "there is no way we would let that get flooded, because if it did the damage would be intolearable" And yet here we are America let it flood, and America is tolerating the visible water damage in the countless homes of people without the resources or assistance to move home.