As the discussion turns to what the Democrats will offer as a legislative agenda beyond Pelosi's first 100 hours, this New York Times Story (in a bid for most understated headline...ever:
Life Is Complicated at Louisiana School, makes it clear.
Katrina. Katrina. Katrina.
With majorities in both bodies passing widespread Katrina relief and reconstruction legislation is no longer something Democrats need to fight for. It's something Democrats need to do.
More than a year after the storm, Smith still lives in a 7-by-27-foot FEMA trailer with seven other relatives. He sleeps in a bed with his father. His mother sleeps on a fold-out sofa, while his sister and her four children take the bunk beds and a mattress fashioned from cushions and the kitchen table.
When he needs privacy to study, Smith leaves the trailer to read by the dome lights of his father's pickup truck.
"Peace and quiet, that's something you don't really get in the house," Smith said.
Otherwise, he said, he does not venture outside much in the FEMA trailer park in Oakville, 30 miles from school.
"Nothing but trouble outside," Smith said. "Drugs. I don't get down with that."
Millions of people, thousands of families live live with daily misery, in part the result of the government incompetence before, during and after the storm. The President and the Republican Congress failed to make good on the promises he made standing in Jackson Square. Now the Democrats need to call them on it.
After Katrina, many people thought things would be different. I hoped that the President's failures exposed stark racial and class divisions to the entire country. But while the outpouring of support in the weeks and months after the storm was overwhelming, the public interest in the long-term health of the region waned. And because the region has become a powerful symbol of the President's failures, Republicans were thrilled to change the subject.
Meanwhile, as months have passed, uncertainty looms over the region, slowly draining it of vitality. For New Orleans, the only question is 'how much smaller?' But for those trying to return and rebuilt and restart their lives there remains much suffering. And the government's failure to make good on the moral promise of our country saps their spirit.
It's hard to wrap your mind around how fucked up things are down there. So many of the residents, especially the children, are experiencing psychological problems from the original trauma, exacerbated by general upheaval in their lives. Then they're forced to negotiate the deliberately bewildering insurance companies and navigate through an the multi-layered bureaucracy of FEMA and city and parish governments whose infrastructure was decimated by the storm.
As I write this, one question keeps bouncing around in my mind:
Haven't these people suffered enough?
I guess that's what this comes down to. The Democratic Party, now in charge of the Legislative Branch of the United State Government has a moral responsibility to do everything in its power to help the millions of Americans get some semblance of live in these Unites States back.
So to those asking for a Democratic legislative agenda, how's this for a start:
- The Katrina Housing Act
- The Gulf Coast Medical System Reconstruction Bill
- The Katrina Mental Health Act of 2007
- Hurricane Victim Insurance Consumer Protection Act
What else?