What Now?

I was listening to Tom Ashbrook's show "On Point" on WBUR tonight; the story was about accountability regarding Katrina. Not surprisingly, they discussed Bush's flip flopping on the response being "unacceptable" and then the response ok, but the results unacceptable, and so on and so forth. They also talked about disaster response structure etc. His main guest was Robert Block, a WSJ journalist. Good story. But what do we do now? Wait for the investigation by Congress?

Like my buddy Laura, I want to write about something else. I want to hear something else on the radio. I want to read something else in the blogosphere. I want to see another picture on the cover of the Metro. At the same time, it's hard to want to take this off the front page. I don't want Bush/Rove et al to succeed in supressing this and filing it away into the notoriously poor collective U.S. memory. So what do we do?

Well, the poor evacuees don't want to come to Massachusetts. I think they probably saw the words "Nor'easter" and "Cape Cod" combined and decided it wasn't for them. They've already had enough of that, and they might as well have it where it's warm. Or maybe we're too bureaucratic. Or maybe they couldn't understand the accent. Or maybe we just don't have enough soul. Right. So what now? How do we keep the importance level high while not dwelling solely on this story?

I also hope that as much as we want to wipe out the stain George Bush has left on our country, we don't try to use this situation to do that. He may be culpable, but it's not likely that he will be held responsible enough to be impeached. We need to focus on root causes, rather than political issues. It makes for a much stronger argument than just saying I hate GWB over and over again.

We need to figure out how to deal with disasters better, like they do in Japan. Amazing that Typhoon 14, which was reportedly the same size as Katrina with slightly slower winds (something like 170mph), only leaves 18 dead and 9 missing. This is opposed to our "thousands" dead and countless missing. Should FEMA rejoin the cabinet-level organizations? How's Homeland Security? Maybe we could replace Mr. Brown with a nice Japanese ... woman.

How's Chertoff's "City of Louisiana" [sic]?

What do we do now? (I think it's pretty obvious by now that I do not know...yet)