The day I never thought would come...finally has.

I never thought I'd establish a blog. They always seemed like a waste of space to me. I mean, my friends' blogs were often interesting, particularly since I have several friends who write well. But the rest of the world...6 billion non-friends. What the hell do I care what their innermost thoughts and daily mundanities are?

But the anger arising in me from the current situation is too much. Things need to be said, and my insane ego leads me to believe that without my voice, they're not being said enough. So here we go.

Marine One vanished into the skies of New Orleans about two hours ago. Six hours ago, President Bush stood on the White House lawn and spoke in a stuttering, almost-gasping, uneven voice, telling us that he would go to New Orleans. He would speak to the people suffering from the disaster, give them assurances of the aid that is on its way, and he would walk among them as a leader should.

Instead, he arrived, occupied desperately needed resources for a briefing from FEMA officials and his entourage, and gave a short speech, and departed to tour the rest of the Gulf Coast by helicopter. The instant he stopped speaking, CNN commentators noted that the briefing he took time out of the rescuers' schedule to receive could just as easily have been done over the phone. The speech, of course, was the true insult of his visit. Gulf Coast residents, he tells us, should take this tragedy as an opportunity. The death of thousands, the shredding of an entire city's infrastructure, the bodies floating in the streets, the insane attacks upon relief efforts, the rape gangs-all of this, we are told, is a blessing in disguise, for we are given the chance to rebuild New Orleans better than ever! Why yes, proud resident, what with the total destruction of your home, your community, and your livelihood, President Bush is looking forward to seeing the better, nicer home that you will build over the ruins of the old!

Perhaps this makes sense to a man whose every failure has been greeted with a promotion. Perhaps it doesn't occur to him that these people simply have nothing left, instead of a fat trust fund or rich parents they can fall back on. Perhaps this is a speech that could only have been given by someone who hasn't looked into the eyes of someone who has had to wade through corpses or dodge bullets or flee what used to be their home in the last five days.

But the President is watching over their plight from the comfort of one of the nicest helicopters in the world, and looks forward to seeing what beautiful new home Trent Lott builds, so our newly tired and poor should take heart.

Is it any wonder that the New York Times published an editorial yesterday saying that his speech on Wednesday about Katrina was one of the worst in his life?

My griping at our leadership aside, the New Orleans disaster has reinforced my general hatred of people. Snipers shooting at a convoy evacuating critically ill patients from a hospital; a Chinook transport helicopter having to withdraw from evacuation operations because it was taking ground fire; police reduced to stealing cars, siphoning gasoline, and hunkering down for the night, because armed gangs roam the streets like it's a combination of Waterworld and Escape from New York. Bush needed to declare martial law three days ago, at the first reports of carjackings. Having not done so yesterday morning, when it became clear that relief efforts were being targeted, borders on criminal negligence. The local officials of Louisiana have discovered (to their chagrin) that the Napoleonic Code that they still operate under does not give them the authority to declare martial law, and some people need killing.

The violence in New Orleans is more blatant than in Iraq. In Iraq, there are IEDs, detonated remotely. Who is doing the killing is not immediately obvious. Here, there are people simply shooting at rescue workers, and the proper response to that is an RPG, or a missle from an Apache helicopter, or napalm. Things are too far gone for anything subtle here, and people who have already picked up weapons with the willingness to shoot innocents in the midst of this will only be deterred by it being made clear that if they do this, they will die. At this point, I'm not even opposed to summary field executions.

So...with the most angry, violent thoughts already out there, I also thought I'd take this opportunity to suggest something constructive. It's too late for this disaster, but maybe for the future...

I wanted to go down to New Orleans and volunteer with the Red Cross earlier this week. Local Red Cross chapters are giving training courses of about two to three hours for people who are willing to deploy immediately. The problem is, they require an absolute minimum of a three-week commitment. I was hoping I'd be able to go down there for a week, perhaps ten days; I could manage things around that, and that wouldn't be too devastating a blow to others taking time off from school, work, etc...but three weeks isn't feasible. Why? The ugly truth of it is money.

I, and, I imagine, many others (damn, this is a lot of commas), simply can't afford to take that much time off to go volunteer. Money is tight, and income has to be made in order to pay the bills that come in every month. It is, however, a fucking shitty reason to not go and help people in desperate need of aid, one I'm guilting over a great deal. Is my credit rating more important than other peoples' health and lives? Is my friend's job at Starbuck's more important? Of course not.

The solution? A government program. (I'm a liberal; what else did you expect?) The government should have a process by which you could quickly register as a volunteer with aid organizations, receive a volunteer number (or something similar), and then send the number to creditors. The creditors will be legally required to give you a deferral until the crisis you are volunteering for passes. Additionally, businesses will be legally prevented from firing employees for volunterring.

"But wait!" you say. "Won't people use this to dodge their bills? Might not people try and milk disasters to avoid paying people?" If the assignment of volunteer numbers/cards/whatever is worked out is done in a corrupt fashion, yes. However, criminal penalties for claiming the benefit without actually volunteering should be extraordinarily steep, and aid organizations making use of such volunteers would do an audit after crises passed to confirm who was where and for how long. (It might be double-checked another way, but that sounds decent off the top of my head.)

"But wait!" you say. "Might not people actually volunteer as a dodge?" In a word, no. The Red Cross representative I spoke to, for example, wanted to make extremely clear that deployment with them would involve long hours of hard work, uncertain access to food and water, and no real place to sleep for, let's remember-at least three weeks. If someone feeling overwhelmed by bills wants to go endure conditions like that for weeks to help people who are even worse off, I say more power to 'em. Hell, if there was some disaster that lasted for months, and people volunteered the whole way through, the American people would be faced with the nightmarish decision between having vastly increased response manpower or the credit card companies grumbling for a few months. Guess which one is more in the national interest?

(Expect this blog to continue in fits and starts, based upon my completely arbitrary levels of rage and/or inspiration.)

Take care, everyone.