I’m talking, of course, about our preparations and response to Hurricane Katrina. It has been and continues to be a national disgrace. This disaster has shaken me up more than I would have expected, and I was further surprised (though relieved) to discover that several of my friends and colleagues felt the same way. It’s a humiliating feeling that we quietly stopped being a first world country some time ago and this is the first major indication.

It’s not that we expect that our nation is immune to natural disasters. We also understand that certain kinds of disasters, like earthquakes, can’t be anticipated in advance.

But hurricanes we can and do track. We knew Katrina was coming, when and where. More damning is that we knew exactly what would happen. For years. The response to Katrina has been both a long- and short-term failure. The behavior of those who were left waiting on a delayed rescue wasn’t always inspiring, either, was it?

There’s so much to regret and react to here, it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s see:

• The glacial emergency response time. I know that I had stopped following Katrina’s progress on the news after hearing about the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. I figured, as I think many of us did, that things were being taken care of after that. When I tuned into the news four days—four days later to see the awful scene at the Superdome, I was thunderstruck.

• The way the media can somehow get there and report before anybody who ostensibly has authority. Man, I hate that. Don’t you? If they can get in there with their flaky little TV vans and helicopters, why can’t the government?

• The way the authorities have acted like the disaster and its consequences were unforeseeable. Basic loss of trust there. What’s going to happen when the next disaster strikes here?

• The looting, the armed gangs, the sniping at rescuers. For God’s sake. You know, when Britain was being bombed to bits in the Blitz, did gangs of looting Londoners erupt in the vacuum of infrastructure and exploit it? I don’t think so. We’re watching, I suppose, the fruits of a sense of entitlement and a culture of dependence. What do we have here? Citizens? Customers? Parasites?

• The short-term planning that is endemic of our entire culture. Nobody wants to think about anything that will happen farther in the future than about 3–5 years, somewhere around the length of a political term in office or one business cycle. These things can be, and were, done better by the Netherlands, a first-world country with a similar geographic problem (being partly beneath sea level). The reaction of the rest of the world is all very interesting, and especially this quote from that article: “The [Netherlands] installed massive hydraulic sea walls known as the Delta Works after devastating floods in 1953. ‘I don’t want to sound overly critical, but it’s hard to imagine that [the damage caused by Katrina] could happen in a Western country,’ [said] Ted Sluijter, press spokesman for Neeltje Jans, the public park where the Delta Works are exhibited.”

• The general fragility of our national infrastructure. The gas pipelines that go through that area don’t have any backups, meaning that Katrina’s impact is felt more heavily by the rest of the nation, especially the Southeast, than it should be. Everything is made just barely good enough but no better, even when vital national interests are at stake. Here in the Southwest, we observe the same sort of federal neglect at the southern border to the U.S. Sure, this is a state border, but it’s also a national border. National interests should be protected more diligently by federal funds and efforts, shouldn’t they?

There’s more, too, like the way that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was placed under Homeland Security in March 2003, instead of letting it continue independently. Former FEMA director James Lee Witt testified to Congress in March 2004, a year later, that he feared this move compromised FEMA’s ability to respond because it had to compete for funds with the rest of Homeland Security, which was focused almost exclusively on terrorism. I suppose he’s unhappy to have been proved right.

From the same article: “No-one cares about disasters until they happen.” Isn’t that the truth. Yet it is the business of government to care about such things, to make investments that don’t make immediate economic sense yet are vital to the general welfare. We live in a country, not a company. Don’t we?