The world's gone bad. We lost the love we had.

You've probably noticed that I have avoided talking about the situation in New Orleans here on this blog. I have only commented on it here and there, because it just sucks and I figured everyone had already said what needed to be said about it. But I've been thinking a lot about it and it's weighed heavy on my mind. Heavier than the World Trade Center attacks 4 years ago, in fact. Sometimes you've just gotta get this stuff down in writing to purge it. Don't expect anything funny from me this time. I'm just not in the mood tonight.

My parents took me out to dinner the other night to celebrate my birthday. We went to a very nice restaurant and my dad and I decided to split chateaubriand. It cost $80. That's almost as much as I donated to the Red Cross the day before. All I could think was, "there's people who stood in line at the Convention Center with no food or water, waiting for a bus for three days. And I'm sitting here eating an $80 piece of steak." Even if it's something that I'm only going to do because it's a special event-type thing, even if I'm not paying for it, I felt guilty. Horribly guilty. But really, what can I do? It's not like I could starve myself as some form of empathy. Well, I could, but it would be pointless. That's not going to help anyone. There's really nothing I can do, short of sending money to the Red Cross, which I've already done.

Now I know how Ray Nagin (the mayor of New Orleans) felt when he went off on everyone and everything last week. It's a horrible feeling to see these things happening and to realize that even though we are supposedly the most powerful country in the world, it somehow takes us five days to get troops and aid into the affected areas. FIVE DAYS. We had Colin Powell walking around on the beach hours after the tsunami hit halfway around the world, yet it takes us 5 days to get troops a state over into New Orleans? And our illustrious leader is busy doing photo ops with country singers in San Diego two days after the storm? What the hell happened last week? Was I in some kind of sick nightmare?

FEMA had predicted this would happen. A major hurricane hitting New Orleans was one of "the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America" (the other two being a terrorist attack on NYC and a major earthquake hitting San Francisco.) Apparently this has been a concern to them since before I was born. Which makes me ask one gigantic question: Where the hell was the disaster plan? If there was one, why the hell wasn't it followed? If it was followed, why the hell did it obviously not work? Many, many lives have been lost because of a fundamental failure on the local, state and governmental level. And preventable deaths are not something I can abide. I can't imagine being one of those old people, dying of dehydration or lack of medicine while waiting in a line for a bus that never came. Imagine those being your last hours. Watching bus after bus, full of people, driving by. None ever stop. Smelling the stench of human waste and sewage in the streets. The stench of death all around. Imagine that being the last thing you ever smell. Dying waiting in a line because your leaders were too incompetent to do their jobs properly. It sickens me. It absolutely sickens me.

From what I understand, the levees held. It was the storm walls that gave in and caused the flooding. Tonight on 60 Minutes, I watched an army engineer, the man who knew the most about the levees and storm walls, explain that even if he'd been given a billion dollars 5 years ago, he could not have done anything because it would have taken 30 years to build the walls properly. And even then, they probably wouldn't have been able to withstand a Category 4 storm like Katrina. Let's hope he gets that billion dollars and they find a better way to build a storm wall when they inevitably rebuild New Orleans. We need to make sure that something like this never happens again.

Hurricane Katrina hitting was a tragedy. Everything that has happened afterwards is a travesty. One that could have been prevented. Somebody needs to be held accountable for what's happened in New Orleans. I don't care what political party they come from, either. There's plenty of blame to go around on something this catastrophic. They need to learn from this. We all need to learn from this.

I never went to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Now it looks like I never will.

Dammit, I am so pissed at everything that's happened. All I can do is send more money. Please do so if you haven't yet. Every little bit helps.