One of my favorite Hurricane Katrina bloggers has posted something that has my mind boggled completely.

You can read the history on his blog, but basically Tim, his wife and daughter are living in a rented apartment because their house was decimated by Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath.

From his entry:

The FEMA lady was very nice and explained the application process step by step, including the Housing Assistance Rejection letter they would be sending me.

Come again?

Yes, she kindly told me, everyone will get a letter that says their request for Housing Assistance is denied. This same letter will explain how to appeal this decision, which she encouraged me to do because I’m probably eligible.

HUH? Yes, this country really is in the hands of buffoons. This surpasses the you-must-have-a-photo-id-for-a-name-you-haven’t-used-in-nearly-thirty-years Catch-22.

Hey, don’t we all feel good knowing how efficiently our taxpayer dollars are working for us?

This entry has inspired me to make a separate “Catch-22″ category for this blog and put all the stupid stuff in there.

The only good thing about stories like this is that we all can feel a little bit smug about the fact that we aren’t as stupid as these bureaucracies are.

This is an amazing post describing two friends, New Orleans, the emotional and physical depth of the devastation. I read this blog and others to remind myself of the depth of devastation they are still experiencing….

Ernie The Attorney: New Orleans - it’s hard to understand the devastation

Technorati Tags: katrina, disaster, new orleans

I realized it’s been too long between posts. I have an excuse — one of my jobs has involved about twice as many hours as usual as a result of Hurricane Katrina. For the past week I’ve thought of about a zillion things I want to say about Katrina, our national outpouring of support on a grass-roots level, the national disgrace that was the initial federal response to the suffering in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama (which is almost not mentioned at all in the news these days)…but by the time I wrap up the day’s work and home stuff, there’s nothing left in my brain.

So here are random thoughts that have been rolling around for a few days, with little to connect them beyond the beast that was Katrina:

The Eye of the Storm is a must-read blog. It’s one reporter’s first-hand account of the storm and continuing aftermath.

I loved Shelly’s characterization of Katrina as the “bitch”. No lie, and a bitch on wheels and water at that.

The Traveling Guys are heading south to give whatever help and support they can to the survivors there. Despite their plan to begin their round-the-world good-deed-doing in Central America, they’ve changed it all to do what they can in the Gulf States. Over and over again over these past days I’m so impressed with the response by people — people with very little, people with a lot, who are giving and doing everything they can to help people down there. I’ve seen so much good in people and such a deep-down human response to this that it’s really taken the edge off of my usual cynical self.

With that said, the FEMA response has been a disgrace, and even more disgraceful was the effort to throw it back on the governor of Louisiana. My own experience with FEMA was less than gratifying back in the Northridge quake days, and it’s only gotten worse since then. All of the excuses about National Guard being in the control of the governor, the nonsense excuse that the governor didn’t specifically mention evacuation assistance in her letter of August 28th is just that — nonsense. An attempt by petty bureaucrats to justify the needless death and suffering of so many. I honestly never thought I’d see anything like I saw last week in this country. My uncle served as a diplomat in third-world countries for 25 years. He took many pictures. None of them prepared me for the carnage in New Orleans, but the indifference of the FEMA officials just hits too damn deep in my gut to be quiet about it.

FEMA was created and exists to assist states when the magnitude of the disaster goes beyond the scope of what an individual state can handle. The Louisiana governor asked for help one full day before Katrina hit and as usual, was ignored. In fact ,the official FEMA statements sound as though no one ever saw the letter she sent off promising that a Category 5 hurricane would decimate New Orleans and much of Louisiana.

I admit to the thought that racism and indifference to poverty had something to do with the slow Washington wake-up. I wonder — would the response have been different if Beverly Hills had been wiped out, Century City turned into a putrid parking lot for every bacteria on the planet and the LA Coliseum opened to refugees?.

Barbara Bush’s comments highlight the fundamental problem. I don’t believe that her comments were in any way intended to be mean-spirited or thoughtless. But they were. She basically said that being dispossessed and relocated was better than the life “they” had, because “they” had nothing.

The unspoken thought hanging inside of her words was that “they” must have been responsible for their “have-nothing” fate, and so are lucky to have this opportunity to start fresh. Thoughtless remarks. Hurtful remarks, perhaps unintentional, but honest and expressive of this attitude that those who are poor somehow earned their way to poverty. Pragmatic but certainly not compassionate.

Politics aside, I am a die-hard jazz fan. The odd time signatures and dissonant harmonics raise a deep response somewhere in my soul, as if they are calling out to me, to dance, to sing, to pray, to lift my head and get on with things. To see the city that I so closely associate with that music under siege and in so much pain is heartbreaking. And Mississippi! My father’s family came from Mississippi (at least, the paternal half). They lived not far from the Louisiana/MS border but farther north than the worst-hit areas. They brought Mississippi to California in subtle but lovely ways — a little southern romanticism, love for the well-spoken and written word, and a passion for simple things. My visits to Mississippi and Louisiana as a kid are some of my strongest memories and were my first introduction to the pure joy of drinking Coke with abandon — a habit that continues today.

New Orleans, Mississippi, Alabama and their citizens are in a quiet and mournful place today, but when it’s time to improvise and pick up the tempo, I know they will be right there in 19/7 time. And I will come and celebrate with them.

I am a Californian. I have lived through earthquakes, brush fires, storms and the resulting flooding that comes with them.

I have an earthquake kit, fully stocked. Every year I faithfully restock it and make sure everything is there — medications, water, food for the dog, kids, T and me. I have been trained from childhood not to expect help to come after a major earthquake for 5-7 days.

The comfort in having the kit is the knowledge that even if help is not on the way, I can take care of the basics until it does come. We may not be comfortable and it will be scary, but we will survive.

What devastates me about this Katrina disaster and particularly the aftermath in New Orleans is that if I were there and had prepared accordingly, there would be nothing that I could do or change or make better and no guarantee that I would even survive until help came.

In California, we all drive. If we don’t, we know someone who does. We could pile everyone in the car and run from the hurricane with our supplies and our dog and our friends and know that we’d be okay. How do you do it when you don’t drive, don’t have friends who drive, don’t have anyone to go to outside of the city and no prospect for shelter, you prepare but your preparations are washed away in the storm surge or the backwash of a broken levee? How do you do it if you have no money for the gas to get out of town?

For all of our preparedness here, we are arrogant Californians. Despite the promise that the “Big One” will arrive and leave us without homes, freeways, cell phones, cash and other amenities, we prepare halfheartedly as if we are making a sacrifice to the earthquake god in order to prove the doomsday-callers wrong year after year after year. We don’t really believe (despite the Northridge earthquake, which was a baby compared to what San Andreas could drop on us…) that it will be as bad as they say, that we could be living in a state without…anything. Can it be far-fetched to think that those who did not evacuate New Orleans also hoped that the doomsday-callers were exaggerating?

I am afraid for the people who still remain. Afraid that if they survive this at all, they will wish they hadn’t, because they have no jobs, no money, no home and no resources. I am afraid that a year from now they will be stricken with illness as a result of their continued exposure to contaminated water, infected mosquitos, rotting bodies, unrelenting heat and humidity.

There will be some who will rise above the obstacles and be not just survivors, but victors. There will be others whose lives will be so unalterably changed that they will not move past it. Those are the ones who concern me — the dispossessed, the poor, the ones without families, those on society’s fringe who had nothing before and surely have nothing now. What made them decide to stay? Perhaps the relative safety of choosing the known over the unknown, or perhaps they were shaking their fist at the doomsday-callers.

I so hope for rapid relief for them, for an entire collection of three small states in our Union of fifty who now know unimaginable devastation, pain and suffering.

If something good comes from this, let it be that we learn ways to be prepared, to trust the authorities who tell us to get the hell out and help us get out, to better care for those who don’t have the resources or wherewithal to be prepared themselves, ways to survive and be victors in the face of overwhelming natural forces.

Give, give, give. Give all you can. Give clean underwear and money and time and blood. Blog today, September 1st, for the charity of your choice. You can list your blog here. My favorite links are on the side and you can find a list of resources on WebMD’s pages covering the hurricane’s aftermath. Help those people, because they have no one else to lean on but compassionate fellow citizens.

instapundit, flood aid, hurricane katrina
International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day

Update: This is really happening 9/2, not 9/1 as I originally wrote