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Monday, September 05, 2005
From the Outside Looking In
You know the Katrina situation is bad when people from third-world countries are shocked at the federal and local response (quotes taken from different parts of this Reuters story):
"I feel very sad about the situation in New Orleans at this time. It looks like a conflict in Africa. The U.S. as a superpower should have done more to solve the situation," said Edith Thompson, a restaurant owner in the capital Monrovia.
"The slow pace in response we have seen after Katrina was due to institutional constraints. I don't buy the racial line. I can liken bureaucracy to asking an elephant to do gymnastics," he said.
"For them as a great nation, I was surprised by the looting. You expect people to pull together," said George Sempa, a telecoms worker in the Ugandan capital Kampala.
"The floods in the U.S. are a natural event that transcends America's power. Despite all their technology and money, they weren't able to do much," said Samba Thiam, a student in the Senegalese capital Dakar where the worst flooding in 20 years have brought chaos in the last few weeks.
"It is not enough to have a warning system. You need to sensitize people to take warnings seriously. Tell them: 'Forget your attachments, you need to get out."
There's much debate happening about the shortcoming in government response to those affected by the hurricane, but it's easy to loose sight of the fact that the United States is and has been for a long time looked up to by many other nations (why I'll never know). They look up to our culture in general and try to emulate it by wearing American clothes, listening to American music, and devouring American television and films. On a more profound level, it seems to me that these same nations revere the infrastructure that allowed us to take care of our own people like other nations could not. This is the biggest reason why I think the handling of Katrina is a worldwide embarrassment. I'm not one to care about superficial appearances but how does it "make us look" when a country as arrogant as the United States completely fails to respond to a natural disaster within its own borders? If 9/11 and now Katrina fails to humble us as a nation, what the hell is it going to take? The story quoted above is a reminder that Americans live in a bullet-proof bubble that cannot be burst by the worst diasters.
Posted by Will at September 5, 2005 12:15 PM in In the News