I’d rather apologize with a water bottle in my hand than bemoan my lack of qualification and stay home. I can understand, readily and easily, with minimal knowledge about the subject matter, why I can’t transplant my own heart. I can understand, readily and easily, with minimal knowledge about the subject matter, why I can’t cure AIDS. I can understand, readily and easily, with minimal knowledge about the subject matter, why I can’t go to the moon by myself. But I apparently need training and experience just to understand what’s so impossible about dropping supplies over a major American city?
Bricker, not to be snarky, but where was all this overemphatic concern about logistics when we picked a fight with Iraq?
It seems if you’re willing to have a faith that a war will effectively democratize a former dictatorship overnight, you should have just a bit more faith that the US is capable of getting water to little dehydrated babies before they turn into little old ladies. Where is your “can do” spirit?
Why do you have to figure out that? It’s only a “have to” if someone is holding a gun to my head forcing me to do it.
Or if the President is standing next to you, saying, “Just do it. I’ve got your back.”
My Bolding:
[SARCASM] Yes, my Brother-in-law a doctor had no one to blame then himself because he stayed on to assist at Charity hospital, with the crazy notion that if the worst case happen, the Government of LA & USA would show up to relieve and supply the hospitals. [/SARCASM]
He was evac’d by helicopter Thursday night. We got the call at 3am Thur day.
He did volunteer, but I cannot accept what you are implying. If you couldn’t get out or volunteered to stay, its your own fault.
I don’t agree that the only logical disaster plan was to organize a total evacuation of the city (other than telling people who could get out to leave). What assests did the city have? Do you know how difficult it would have been to organize (logistically) such a massive movement of people out of the city in 24-36 hours? The city may have had the resources (I have my doubts) - but it would have taken a Herculean effort to ramp up a process to get anywhere from 50 to 100,000 people out of harms way before the Hurricane hit.
Granted, the city COULD (and maybe SHOULD) have had such a contingency plan, but without periodical exercising for such a scenario, then the evacuation wouldn’t have succeeded.
We had plenty of time to plan Iraq. We had MONTHS to execute the logistics. And they were insanely complicated. We didn’t go from zero to Baghdad in a week.
If you don’t figure it out, then you’re asking someone, somewhere, to break the law and personally assume the responsibility for illegally committing equipment. Someone is going to have to be the guy that says, “Yes, do this.” If he’s a FedEx guy, then he could be personally liable to the stockholders for losses. If he’s a government guy, he’s breaking federal law and awarding what amounts to a millions+ contract without bid, proposal, or review.
The “have to” arises from the situation itself. One guy with a truck can just go. To send a fleet requires planning to cover the issues I mention, and a dozen others I haven’t.
Someone made a decision to hire Halliburton (with a proposal, but no competition) because the situation was urgent and their expertise was needed right away. Probably that person was told by some well-meaning advisor, “Worry about the contract details later.” Look how that decision has been raked over the coals.
Sure. I’ve noticed how forgiving the opposition is to the President. I’m sure if he pardoned someone for issuing a multi-million dollar contract to enrich some corporations in violation of federal law, there would be no criticism of that.
It was a war! We’re talking about helping people, not killing them. The military is designed for the latter, not the former. You really think people would judge it in the same way?
I’ll say this, if you’re right, Bricker, and I’m wrong, I’d rather be the lone nut standing in his Subaru at the edge of Lake Ponchartrain, with a single case of bottled water wondering how he was going to get into the city, than the person who has to explain to the American people why the subtle art of military logistics dictated that the proper course of action as of Tuesday afternoon was simply to wait until we got there on Friday no matter how many were going to die.
Once again: I suggested asking FedEx & UPS to provide the dispatching control not the trucks.
The request would be in the form of donating the skill and logistics capacity that both companies have in excess.
Halliburton was hired to stop oil field fires and restore destroyed oil production facilities.
I don’t blame you.
In the same way, you’d probably rather be the doctor that worked on the first guy you found in need, rather than having to explain to his family that you followed the rules of triage, and let that guy die, because your skills were put to better use evaluating 100 patients and directing them to proper medical care. Right?
Nonetheless – and as sad as it must be for the family of a guy that dies under the triage system – we use triage in emergency medical care for a damn good reason.
The difference between triage and the truck situation you’re talking about is that not adhering to improper triage puts lives in danger. The only thing at stake in the truck situation is politics.
You make the ethical call as to which one is worse.
Bricker, Sequent, eponymous & you with the face
Good night. This conversation in compelling but I must go to sleep.
I don’t agree with you Bricker but I respect your right to your opinions.
Sequent, as you know, I don’t think this is racial at all, but I do think it is a dismal failure.
No. Read the discussion above. There are legal issues. There are financial issues. And the triage analogy is even more on point because the people that should be working on a big plan would, under your scenario, be running around working on half-assed measures. It’s EXACTLY like triage: taking the time to do it right may cause a small loss early on, but save more lives in the long run.
Right. Because I could do it with a straight face. I could rely on the fact that most people understand the concept of triage. The concept of saving who you can, as many as you can. It makes sense to people. Not the bereaved, but to most people.
This doesn’t make sense to people. It’s not even an issue I thought was still up for debate when I wrote the OP. People don’t understand it. It doesn’t make sense to us logistical phillistines. To you, maybe it does. And perhaps you could find a way to strike down any plan we could propose here that may or may not have made a difference.
But in a very basic, elemental way, it doesn’t make sense that we couldn’t help these people sooner, and in a very basic, elemental way, there is a pervasive sense throughout the country now that we failed them. The President, the military, the governor, the mayor…I don’t know who is to blame. I can only hope, for their sake, that whoever does the explaining can come up with a more convincing story.
Triage is what happens when you have more patients than time and resources to treat them all properly. We had Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to figure out something else, but we didn’t, and that’s not triage. There was no benefit from the sacrifice. It was simply wasted time.
I agree with your sentiments here - we did fail them. And I think there’s plenty of blame to go around. What’s probably the saddest thing is that another foreseeable catastrophe will happen again and the same kind of mistakes will be made.
I mean, it’s easy to fall asleep after glib rendering after rendering. But let’s get down to the facts:
-
We did need to go to war in Iraq and in light of this, did not need to give Haliburton a no bid contract. BTW, the Vice President worked for this company but I’m sure we have pointed that out a million times.
-
Iraq is full of Iraqiis and America is full of Americans. It seems right and fitting that some extra expediency be used in helping Americans.
-
Hurricane hit America. Refer to rule 2 to see who this harms. It seems right and fitting that we should be more flexible with the rules. Americans helping Americans right? I’m sure companies have little to fear by not adhering to convention and lending aid in charity or for future payback. Don’t you think the courts would forgive them?
Personally I’m sensing the disconnect between corporate America and “The People.”
I respectfully, wholeheartedly disagree.
Last year, I deployed with 150 other people to the Middle East, and furthermore sent them to two different continents. I had to feed them, send them materials and supplies, and keep them otherwise alive and productive. When weather, site conditions, legal problems, and just general human nature get in the way of things, people need to be creative in their solutions. It sucks when you need to ship 14 pallets of lumber and two pallets of MREs to the Horn of Africa, and you suddenly find out ‘airflow’ doesn’t exist that week.
If it were a “science”, it’d be rack-and-stack by the numbers, and would have been done already. On the strategical level, it may seem like a science. However, on the tactical level, it’s definitely an art.
Tripler
Am I an artist? By no means. But I can draw a pretty stick figure and make it work.
I’m getting into this thread very late (and after it seems to have devolved into increasingly obscure and insoluble issues of logistical detail). Sequent: Really phenomenal OP and solid subsequent defense. You did a heroic job pretty much alone in this battle.
I think you’re facing so much resistance because people in this thread define racism as narrowly as possible. Racism in this day and age is mostly about being neglected and ignored. It’s only occasionally about outright malice. But mostly it’s not any one thing - it’s the convergence of forces: ranging from being the most vulnerable to bad luck and bungling, to neglect, to outright hate and discrimination, that leave a certain group of people consistently holding the short end of the stick. Making some people consistently play society’s red shirts.
Sometimes black people are overlooked and neglected because they’re black (people in power don’t identify with them and don’t think about their needs automatically), sometimes because they’re poor, sometimes both. Sometimes it’s chance. Sometimes it’s impossible to say exactly what the reason is - but it just is. In this case, aside from the delay in rescuing (which I’ll let you guys continue to bicker about), I can point to any number of direct ways in which this particular population was overlooked :
-
When funding was massively cut for maintaining levies in a largely poor black city. Levies that would cause a catastrophic loss of life if they didn’t hold.
-
When their inability to escape was not fully appreciated by planners. They were just thinking in terms of a middle class white person with a car and enough money for a hotel room. (I vividly remember the FEMA director yesterday saying we didn’t anticipate 100K people remaining in the city. I don’t entirely doubt him. You wouldn’t think about the impossibility of leaving the city with no car no public transportation no place to go and no money if you’re white and middle class. )
-
At this very moment I’m wondering why the media is not doing the same kind of coverage they did during 9/11. When I turn on the t.v. there’s regular programming and right now nothing on NO or the hurricane on ANY station (I don’t have cable so I don’t get the 24 hour news.) But I remember during 9/11 all the networks were covering the situation 24-7 for days. Regular programming was completely suspended long after the immediate crisis was over. Comedy shows were considered inappropriate given the massive loss of life. But this time, as an entire city still lays dying and the situation is still desperate - What did I see right after nightline went off? Jimmy Kimmel’s stupid jokes. Jay Leno. shudder. This disaster is far worse than 9/11 and I can’t fathom that NBC is still showing Fear Factor. It leaves me ill.
Also the whole “looting” issue has a clearly racist element to it. From the beginning the “looting” was assumed to be criminality by most of the media - as well as by the governor and president - and not desperation. Probably because it recalled looting during the L.A. riots so vividly. I do think if that had been white people looting they would have been given the benefit of the doubt and looting would have reinforced the sense of desperation and that rescue was urgently needed.
Is it malice, is it hate, is every unfairness always about race? No. IN fact, unless somebody’s burning a cross on a lawn it’s very hard to prove that any one act or circumstance is racist. There were frankly so many forces converging to make that particular group of people who were left stranded and ignored and neglected be almost entirely black. But those forces are clearly not random.
Yeah, here’s another hero: Kanye West.
There just aren’t enough rolleyes in the world.