Mind Your P's and Q's

My sister, Kate, thought she'd put her political science degree, and her natuaral activism, to use, and write an extremely eloquent and poignant editorial for the local Newspaper:

As the fourth anniversary of September 11 approaches I am struck by how little our government has done to be prepared for a disaster.

On September 11, 2001 as I sat in the front office of Congresswoman Shelley Berkley, in the middle of my last week as a staff assistant, one of my coworkers yelled to turn the TV on: a plane had just hit one of the Twin Towers. "Now, how dumb was that pilot," I thought, "it's not like those are hard to miss."

So we turned on the TV, and just like much of America were perplexed by what was going on. Then we all caught our breath as another plane came into the shot and very deliberately hit the other tower. There was a stunned silence. No one moved in the normally bustling congressional hallway. The phones stopped ringing, and we all just looked at each other. It couldn't be. This could not be happening. Not here. We had heard it was possible, but we never thought it would happen. Almost as suddenly as everything stopped it started again. The phone would not stop ringing, and the footsteps in the hall became very deliberate and almost panicked.

We were still trying to decide what to do. Stay or go. Our instincts told us that we were targets, but we didn't want to overreact. The phone rang, I picked it up and on the other end was the frantic voice of a coworker and friend who was sitting in traffic on I395, the main highway that brings workers into the city from Virginia and that goes right by the Pentagon. She screamed at me that she had just watched a plane hit the Pentagon.

"Wait a minute," I said, "are you sure?" She screamed again that she was sitting right by the Pentagon in traffic and had watched the plane smash into the large military fortress. There was fire and mayhem and she just kept screaming. I told her to take some good deep breaths and call her husband. I then had the task of informing the Congresswoman what I had just been told. My chief of staff told me to call the Capitol Police and see what information they had. None of us wanted to believe what our co-worker and friend had just seen.

I got on the phone and called the people who were charged with keeping all of Capitol Hill safe and secure, sure that they would be telling us to evacuate immediately. What I got was a woman who had no clue. "Have you heard that a plane hit the Pentagon?" I asked her.

Without putting her hand over the phone or putting me on hold I heard her yell into the room: "Anyone heard about a plane hitting the Pentagon?"

No response. When she finally got back on the phone she said, "Well maybe it was just a helicopter or a small plane."

"No," I responded, "my friend just called and she watched a passenger jet hit the Pentagon."

"Well," she said, "Just mind your p's and q's." And then hung up.

JUST A HELICOPTER? MIND MY P'S AND Q'S???? That was their great plan. I looked up and watched as all of my co-workers and I realized we needed to get the hell out of there. We came up with our evacuation plan very quickly, [and went into] one of the local bars. We sat there the whole day in shock as we watched the events unfold, not knowing what to do or if we were next.

Four years later, cut to New Orleans, Louisiana, one of the most unique cities on earth. An American city that had 3 days warning that a possible catastrophe was headed its way. The catastrophe that the city government, the state government, and the federal government all knew was not only possible, but probable. We all watched the mayor plead with his people to leave, knowing that hundreds of thousands of them had no way out because they were too poor to afford cars or any other means of transportation. And some were just typical New Orleans residents and were too stubborn to leave their city. Katrina made land fall, and almost immediately things started going wrong.

New Orleans is shaped like a bowl, so any amount of rainwater collects and they expect flooding. That's why many of the houses are on stilts a few feet off the ground. They also have pumps to help get the water out of the city as quickly as possible. The pumps were failing, and they weren't failing just anywhere. They were failing in the Ninth Ward, the poorest area of the city, parts of which have been described to me as almost like a third world country.

The storm passed and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, because the widespread devastation seemed to be avoided. Except that the levees that keep the water from Lake Ponchartrain out of the city were only strong enough to hold up against a category 3 storm. Katrina was a category 5, which "luckily" weakened to a category 4 before it got to New Orleans. We all know the rest of the story and have seen the pictures on CNN, in the paper and on the internet.

As I watched all this unfold, the voice of the woman on the other end of the phone kept echoing in my ears. "Mind your p's and q's." For nearly 5 days after the catastrophe that's what I heard our government telling the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. "Mind your p's and q's," figure out how to handle this because we don't know what we're doing.

It didn't occur to us that the levee might break even though our own private engineering firm, The Army Corps of Engineers, has been telling us for years that the levee would only withstand a Category 3, but the area could easily be struck by a category 5. The government had in fact been cutting the New Orleans budget, in an effort to fight a war that is becoming more and more pointless everyday. And they struggled to provide basic necessities such as water, also due to a war that even some of the President's biggest supporters are quietly starting to question. Our money, our troops and our means are all in a country that overwhelmingly doesn't want us there, and our people are dying of starvation and dehydration while they wait as the most powerful government on earth, a government that is supposedly theirs, scrambled to figure out what to do.

Of course, this particular class and race of people is used to hearing, "mind your p's and q's" from "their" government. Who could help but notice the faces of the crowds at the Superdome and Convention Center? They were overwhelmingly black. These were the people who were stuck. Most of the white city was able to get out, because as in most cities in this country, they were the ones with the means. The mayor of the city was stuck, also. He knew he needed the federal government's help to save his city and the people in it. But he kept getting the response I got, but on a much larger and insidious scale: "Mind your p's and q's." Eventually we'll figure this out, but do the best you can until we do.

Days went by and we watched as the city just deteriorated into chaos. People became desperate to take care of themselves in anyway they could. And the media latched on. Words like "looting" and "gangs" became the norm. But we would also hear about families who were just trying to survive. Then we started to realize that the families who were "looting" and were in "gangs" were black, and those who were just trying to survive were white. I'm not saying that there weren't people who were stealing TV's and Nike sneakers, but those were a select few. Yet, that's what we were hearing about. Don't focus on the people who were trying to help their neighbors or what the federal government wasn't doing. Focus on the small number of people who were stealing TV's and Nike shoes. Oh, and lets not mention that this is the most blatant case of racism and classism this country has seen in decades. That doesn't exist here. After all, we are the greatest country on earth. If you have money and you have the right skin color, that is.

My hope for this is that tens of thousands of people didn't die in vain. My hope is that the apathetic in this country wake up. They are the ones that have allowed our government to become a 'Mind your p's and q's' government. They are the ones who are not holding their elected officials responsible for their actions. They are the ones who have allowed our country to be overrun by special interests, huge conglomerates and a media that is just as apathetic as they are.

We live in a scary time when we are heartbeats away from another draft, and our economy being outsourced all over the world. Yet nobody sees this because we all still think we are comfortable. Well, wake up. Watch the faces of the mothers, carrying their babies who are so lethargic because their little bodies don't have enough fluid, and tell me that we have the greatest government on earth. Watch our President spend millions of dollars to fly over the devastated Gulf Coast and then say, "Don't worry, I won't forget," and still not send aid for days, and tell me that we have a leader in the White House. Send your kids out into the workforce and watch them get minimum wage jobs, because all the good jobs are going oversees and tell me that they are comfortable. Keep minding your p's and q's, America, and just see where it gets us.