Recovering from Katrina: Failure is Not an Option

Clearly, something is now broken in America. If failure is truly not an option, then we must evolve from where we are today to something that will give us more effective principles for more robust security, both at home and abroad.

Democracy Now is producing very powerful one hour broadcasts on the crisis and chaos resulting from hurricane Katrina. These can be easily be streamed or downloaded to your computer, for free, and I highly recommend taking the time to watch the shows.

Today's show, September 02, covers many aspects of this catastrophe, both natural and man made, with strong reports on the underlying race and class issues which have made matters so much worse than they needed to have been.

Why, for example, when it was well known in New Orleans that 10s of thousands of residents [One quarter of New Orleans residents -- some 134,000 people -- don't own a car - Progress Report] could not afford private transportation of any kind, was zero effort made by any government unit to evacuate these most at risk citizens when the general evacuation order was given BEFORE the storm?

There is a strong segment in which Bush's "zero tolerance" posture is turned against him and applied to Bush and the failures of his leadership. This may be a harbinger of things to come.

Mat Gross also has a passionate post on his blog: Clueless

I've posted at least fourteen times today-- perhaps the most outrageous and disgusting day I've ever witnessed in these here United States of America. Let me just rip wholesale from Kevin Drum:

Could the people in charge of managing the catastrophe in New Orleans possibly be more clueless?

George W. Bush, President of the United States, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security, following widespread eyewitness reports of refugees living like animals at the Convention Center: "I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the Convention Center who don't have food and water."

Mike Brown, Director of FEMA, referring to people who were stuck in New Orleans largely because they were too poor to afford the means to leave: "...those who are stranded, who chose not to evacuate, who chose not to leave the city..."

The aftermath of Katrina clearly shows that something is clearly broken in America. And it is not just the communications tools that, 4 years after 911 in New York, still fail our first responders. Perhaps what is broken is our current core organizational principle: top down, hub and spoke. It is past time to ask if there is a better model we could avail ourselves of.

In an earlier post here, Can the Democratic party Evolve, I suggest there is.

It is time for us to move beyond our current political and communications models and to start implementing a politics and a communications that are based upon the concepts of mesh networks. The old model served us well for a time, but now we have moved beyond the limits of its effectiveness. In 2005, we have accumulated the knowledge and the experience to move on to more effective principles.

Posted by Jock Gill at September 2, 2005 1:17 PM | TrackBack