Wednesday, September 7

"...But There Has Always Been Good, And There Is Good Now."

New Orleans evacuee, Ronnie Hebert, smiles after receiving a flower at her arrival Wednesday, to a refugee center at the old Navel Reserve center in Columbia, S.C.

AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain

'Tis a thing of beauty to see her smile, is it not?

So many people blaming each other...the media has had quite a smorgasbord to pick and choose their tasty story morsels from. Do we blame the mayor of New Orleans? The FEMA director? The President? It seems that there was a whole chain made of weak links, not just one or two.


I listened to National Public Radio tonight while driving home from work. They were talking with the Chief of Police of New Orleans.

He was asked about the lawlessness. The chief, in a tired, tattered, yet strangely fierce voice said,

"I am pissed off from all the negative talk about who didn't do what and how everything went wrong. No one has said anything, anything at all about my 1200 men who stayed on the force after the hurricane hit. Who kept working day after day without radio communication, food, water, ammo, and sleep. Wondering where their own family and friends were and if they were safe.

You hear about the rapes, the looting, the beatings, but what you don't hear about is how many of those we prevented, how many thugs we rounded up and put away, how many lives of the weak and the young we kept from getting further victimized.

You interview anyone who saw what went on in New Orleans and they will say 'Yes, we certainly saw the human being at his worst. But we also saw the human being at his finest.' That was my men of the force, doing what they could with literally nothing but their courage, their wits, and their hearts."

A lot of things went wrong. Unbelievably, catastrophically wrong. But a lot of people also went above and beyond to help out in an unprecendented way for an unprecendented event in time.

As Dr. Maya Angelou said: "...There has always been evil, and there will always be evil, but there has always been good, and there is good now."

There are two ways to spread the light: either be the candle or be the mirror.
Trying very hard to at least be a mirror,
A.M.Adams

posted by A.M.Adams @ 9/07/2005 09:35:00 PM

1 Comments:

At 12:04 PM, Blogger Michelle Miles said...

What a great post. I love that the chief bit back.

 

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