The Anniversary Ends, The Pain Continues.

The speed with which news organizations high-tailed it out of the Gulf Coast after yesterday's 1-year anniversary of the levee failure that doomed New Orleans suggests that maybe the CNN line producer should be in charge of future evacuation efforts. The 8/29 milestone was handled, not as if it were an ongoing event, but as a marker fitting of a memorial service and a day's worth of scrutiny in the news cycle, only to move on to a guy in a Reagan mask robbing a bank and other important issues affecting out nation. The accidental catching of Kyra Phillips on mike in the bathroom during the President's speech was not emblematic of journalistic incompetence, but of exactly how worthy they thought the Katrina anniversary was, that they could take bathroom breaks while it was occurring.

Not only was I disturbed by this, but Tom D'Antoni, a writer based in Portland, Oregon, caught it as well. He blogs for the Huffington Post:

Any American touched by New Orleans prior to the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers and the subsequent flood, and who has re-visited or even keeps in touch with things there, knows how bad things are [...]

This is about the emotions those of us who have a New Orleans connection are feeling. The emotions that come through the psychic air 3500 miles away here in Portland, Oregon...the despair, the anger, the sense of living in a daily nightmare that just won't seem to go away. The sense of loss. Loss and abandonment. Is anyone surprised that the suicide rate in New Orleans has tripled in the past year?

Can you feel it?

How dare Bush show his face? The shame of the conditions in New Orleans is on him. It should eat him alive at night...that and the tens of thousands of dead and maimed Americans and Iraqis from his own personal boutique war.

Maybe that's why Bush only showed his face briefly (and how dare he say that "we delivered" for the people of the region). This "anniversary party" was an insult to the struggles of everyone in the Gulf Coast area, a ginned-up excuse to run human interest stories and surface-level accounts of disaster (most of which sloppily neglected the plain fact that failed levees caused the disaster in New Orleans, not the hurricane itself). The fact that a year later:

300,000 survivors remain separated from their homes in a kind of diaspora;

120,000 have applied for federal grants to rebuild their homes, and under 100 have seen a dime (a symptom of the $65 billion in appropriated but unspent money);

only 41% of the gas lines have been restored, and 60% of the electricity service;

17% of the buses are running;

there is 23% unemployment among survivors who are still displaced by the storm;

The health care system has almost completely collapsed;

The criminal justice system is a bigger mess and actually a constitutional crisis, with people held for minor offenses without trial for a year, others wrongfully imprisoned, and hardened criminals set free;

...is a national disgrace to us all.

We don't need a one-day anniversary. We don't need the tolling of bells and moving on. We need a substantive discussion about the waste, fraud and abuse that tragically had us basically lose a year on the restoration of New Orleans and the Gulf, and a real debate about how to move forward. One person who gets this is Stephanie Grace of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, who wrote this last week:

Yet if Aug. 29 is just a date, it will also mark the end of the first chapter of this story.

The networks and national newspapers will be here to take measure of the recovery, or lack thereof, as they have at every key milestone since Katrina made landfall. The politicians, including both Bush and the Democrats who hope to capitalize on his missteps, will be here too.

When it's over, they'll leave, unlikely to check back nearly as often.

And they won't be the only ones to turn their attention elsewhere. Just the other day, a new survey disclosed that just seven percent of foundations and philanthropies planned to be involved in recovery past September.

If those struggling to remake their lives feel forgotten now, just wait 'til next year.

That's astonishing that the city and the region will be essentially abandoned in a month. Similarly, rental subsidies for displaced survivors end in a couple weeks. People who are scraping by today will have less of a chance to do so tomorrow. It's past time to wonder whether the federal government, or the state, is going to step in to help. They'll talk about it on anniversaries, but really this is now down to we the people to band together and help our fellow man. It's the core of progressivism to seek the common good, to share in the sorrows and troubles of the less fortunate, and to offer them the opportunity to experience the American dream.

There are a wide range of charitable organizations who are providing relief, but as the above article says, there's no guarantee they'll be there in a month. So I'm going to do some more research and come up with a better way. We cannot turn away from this until next year.