Since credit should be given where credit's due

- Yesterday I bitched about how no one has taken any direct responsibility for screwing up with Katrina. Today the last person I expected to do that stepped up to the plate:

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," Bush said at joint White House news conference with the president of Iraq.

"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said.

Wow, this might be the most brutally honest and factual statement to come from him in over five years in office. But I do have some reservations about that "federal government" caveat, especially since certain former FEMA directors seemed to be awfully eager to find reasons why this was all the fault of local and state authorities. So in case he can't find specific things to take the blame for, here's just a few: underfunding FEMA to where they couldn't prepare for the projected "Hurricane Pam" catastrophe, taking the funds for fixing the levees to fight a war, putting a political crony who couldn't even run a horse association in charge of FEMA, and generally acting like the first few days of this crisis were just an unfortunate distraction to his vacation time. Shall I go on?

Yes, the local and state people fucked up. I have little doubt they won't be around for the next election cycle. Unfortunately, we can't take back last year's election retrospectively. So the least that can be done now is to focus on this question - Do you feel safer now than you did on 9/11/05? What will it take for that to happen? And I'm not talking about going out every possible terrorist on earth, because that would be futile. There are a lot of changes that need to be made to this nation's infrastructure, and NOW is the time to do it. Quit sending Homeland Security money to Wyoming (#1 receiver of funds, per capita) and figure out what would need to be done if the New Madrid Fault erupted, or a tanker with cyanide gas breaks open in downtown Wichita. No one is immune to tragedy, no matter how affluent they are or who they vote for. The best that we can do is make the impact as small as possible.

- In related-but-not-really news, I did something pretty cool last night. I trained to be a Red Cross shelter volunteer. They've asked for 1,000 volunteers for one (possibly two) evacuee shelters in Nashville, and outlying counties also have Red Cross shelters. Personally, I thought it was the least I could do. I don't have much money to contribute, but I'm single and have a fair amount of weekend time to burn. It's only right to help. As a Southerner, I really feel like these are my people, no matter what, and I would only hope they'd feel the same if things were reversed.

A couple of things really struck me at the training session. For one, it seemed like 9/10ths of the people are women. I don't know why I think this is strange, but I do. The only reason I can think of why this would be the case is that there are a lot of stay-at-home moms who want to pitch in. The training time was late in the evening, which is the only time I could do it after working all day. So I can't see a lot of men saying "I had to work" unless they worked till 8 pm.

Also, the Red Cross is completely funded by contributions. They receive no government funding whatsoever, and the only group affiliation I could see was their partnership with the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief Brotherhood in providing hot meals in disaster areas. And they go to great, great lengths to make sure that you think of and treat all people in the shelter equally. Everyone was affected by this disaster, not just in one racial or sociological group, and they all get the same help from the Red Cross.

And the aim is to not treat evacuees like they're poor or victims or inferior in any way, but as people just like us who need help to get through something that's disrupted their lives. That's one reason that they almost never take donations of food or clothing from individuals - they want to give people the independence to eat or buy what they normally would. And that's really smart, because when you give someone a little control over what they're doing, even in the little things, they'll take charge more with the rest of their lives. And they talked a lot about the people in the Nashville shelter who have already gotten jobs here and moved into their own housing. These aren't independently wealthy people - they're just taking charge of their lives. And that's a pretty big feat for two weeks after you lost everything you owned thousands of miles away.

The final thing I really noticed is the organization. Everything that the Red Cross does has a name and is part of a plan for either starting, running or closing the shelter. That might be a little daunting in some things (I filled out four forms last night, and I was only a volunteer) but it seems to keep things running smoothly.

In any case, they have so many volunteers that my first shift in Nashville isn't scheduled till the first of October. Maybe I'll try to see if they need help in Franklin and Smyrna in the meantime. But I can only hope that the people affected will soon not need our help. In the meantime, I strongly urge you to volunteer your time with your local Red Cross chapter or America's Second Harvest. Neither group seem to have an agenda beyond helping, and really, that's the only agenda that's needed right now.