Friday, January 2, 2009
Screw the people, save the Barrier Islands!
Well, ok, we need the barrier islands to be a storm break. I'll give 'em that. And I guess it will be doubly important now that there will shortly be thousands of homeless families hitting the streets in the next few months when all the temporary housing is gone and we still can't move into our homes.
Yeah, well, watch me. I've already decided what I'm going to do. I'm running some more wiring into my house from the temporary pole (unless FEMA decides they just HAVE to have it, and of course, it will never be reused, so this would just be more government tunnel vision and pure meanness on their part to take it). I'm leaning drywall up against the walls and putting the area rugs I have on the floor. Might even lay out some of the ceramic tile in the bathroom. And I will camp out in the house and work online and continue trying to save my home.
It just boggles my mind that they can send billions to and spend billions on other countries and yet say they are done with the people in their own country. Three years has been enough time to recover? Hmmmm. Our county offices are still in trailers and tents to this day. The county jail is in a freakin TENT! I'm not EVEN kidding. Insurance claims are still being fought out in court. When people think three years is enough, what part of the *worst/most expensive natural disaster to hit this country in recorded history* do they not understand? It's a 5 to 7 year recovery process in something this massive.
I think maybe one of the reasons I'm sooooo pissed about this latest from Gov. Barbour is the last thing I heard about him was a big front page spread of the Christmas decorations in the Governor's Mansion, which they decorated with seaside type decorations in *honor* of the Gulf Coast. Don't make me gag. They should have decorated the tree with little models of gutted homes and FEMA campers and Katrina cottages with March 1 eviction notices on the doors. They should have made garland from the *Blue Roof* plastic and wood strips used to nail them down. Maybe some fimo models of people sleeping in their driveways with bugs crawling on them. Or waving goodbye to the temporary shelter they just lost.
It really bothers me that this whole country isn't outraged at how the people on the Gulf Coast are being treated enough to be screaming at their elected officials. Because when something bad happens to where you live, do you think it will be any better for you? It's not that we expect handouts. What we expected was equity, fairness, help instead of hindrance from our building departments and recognition that not every situation will fall into a nice neat little box of circumstances and that there be some assistance for those situations, too. Has it really not occurred to anyone that if we lose our homes after losing everything in them that we will have absolutely nothing left and be unable to recover from that? A hand up now precludes a handout later. Leave us to rot now and we become public assistance recipients later. Do we want that? Of course not, or we would have already been that.
The punch line is that Mississippi spent MORE making sure nobody received one penny more than they *should have* than they released in grant funds. The Feds spent God only knows how much paying people to make sure their Toxic Trailers weren't being damaged by a whole family crammed into 200 sq. ft. when they could have been putting that money into rebuilding homes. They could have sent every family over $150,000 to rebuild with and had millions, billions left over. Just a flat rate, this is what you get. This state would have been better off with better homes built, faster recovery, more money left to put into damaged roads, ports, schools, etc. And no one would have fallen through the cracks or been left behind in the dust of rebuilding. I wouldn't be toxic, I'd be driving and working and my home would NOT be in foreclosure danger.
But that would be productive and make sense, and we can't have THAT, now can we?
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