A year later

Everyone in America should see Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts about Hurricane Katrina. You see those images, you know the ones I'm talking about, the dead bodies floating in the water, the people in line outside the convention center with no food or water, and you just wonder, how did this happen in America? This happens in Third World countries, not the United States of America, the richest country in the world. People were treated shamefully with no dignity whatsoever, and the poor, the elderly, and the sick were the ones who suffered the most. The government failed these people and basically allowed them to die.

My reaction to the documentary was shock, then sadness, and finally anger. You want to point the finger at someone, put the blame on Ray Nagin or Michael Brown or President Bush. And don't get me wrong, those people were responsible, but after mulling it over for awhile, I had this realization: at some level every person in America is responsible for letting something like this happen. Including me. Ouch. We live our comfortable lives and allow ourselves to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others going on all around us, even in our own communities, not to mention around the world. We allow people to slip through the cracks and live in poverty, and when a disaster like this strikes somehow we're surprised that they are the ones who get hit the worst?

And I think the government's handling of the situation highlights our national attitude problem, this attitude of I can't do anything, I don't matter, let's not prepare for a disaster, let's just wait for it to happen and then deal with it. Let's enjoy life now and deal with the consequences later. When we fail we'll pass the buck and refuse to take responsibility. We're extremely bad at long-term planning, witness the war in Iraq and our failure to deal with environmental issues like global warming.

And finally we are the ones who put the current leaders into power, leaders who 1) are incompetent and 2) care more about protecting the interests of the rich than protecting the poorest members of society. Not that I voted for Bush, but you didn't exactly see me campaigning against him.

Watching this documentary made me angry, not just at our government but angry at myself because I see all these problems in our society and yet I do nothing about them. This documentary really brought it home for me--this is what happens when we fail to act. And it makes me want to do something, protest or feed the homeless or donate money or build a house, anything so that I'm changing the world for the better and not just sitting around watching and criticizing. Maybe that's the whole point of the documentary, to not only make us angry but to motivate us to change.