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June 26, 2008-4:04 p.m. The other day I was reading an article about how people in one of the small towns along the Mississippi River felt the government had deceived them. I cannot find the story or I would link it here but the gist of the story was this---The townspeople were evidently told in 1999 by someone in government that the levees would hold and they were so confident that many of them cancelled their flood insurance. So even when people were stacking sandbags on these levees, these people were certain that no water would come near their homes. The article was about how only a handfull of people in the town of 750 had kept their flood insurance and how they were pretty bitterly disappointed now that the government had turned out to be wrong about the levees. And this is probably not very empathetic of me but all I could think was what those people in that town must have thought in 2005 when the levees were compromised in New Orleans by hurricane Katrina. Did they think that they were safe because the likelihood of a hurricane striking Iowa was pretty slim? Did it not occur to anyone there that the exact same Army Corps of Engineers built their levees and they probably ought to call the flood insurance people post haste? Did they think the government would protect them because they are white or that God would protect them because there wasn't a Gay Pride Parade on the calendar? What were they thinking? **Disclaimer: All characters in this diary are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, real or imagined, is purely coincidental and unintentional.** |
