Have a Heart

If some arrogant arse bashes me for this post, or for my preferred method of expressing my political/other views in general, I don't give a damn. If this is "ad hominem" I don't give a damn. This is how I feel and like MOST other human beings in this world, I am emotionally affected by stories like these:

If she didn't have younger siblings to watch and three of her own small children depending on her, Lakerisha Boyd could do what she feels like doing here in an old motel near the Astrodome.

She could cry for her youngest child, Torry Lee, who is still missing almost two weeks after the storm.

But even tears are a luxury that Ms. Boyd cannot afford during her grueling vigil of praying and hoping and waiting. She has worked the Internet, the telephones and her feet to the point of exhaustion looking for the 16-month-old who was with his grandmother just before Hurricane Katrina swept into New Orleans.

On Friday, 11 days after the storm, grandmother and grandchild were still missing.

"I keep telling myself it's going to be all right," said Ms. Boyd, breathing deeply to control frayed nerves and turning her face away from her room, where 11 people are sharing two beds. "I can't start crying because of the other children. I can't break down. I'm all they've got right now. But I just want to know, where's my baby?"

Ms. Boyd, 23, is certainly not alone in her sorrowful quest. Officials said there was no way at this point to estimate how many children have been severed from families, but early figures suggest the tally could be in the thousands......

The story of how Edwina Foster, 11, and her brother Foster Edward, 9, lost their mother is typical. Family members were wading through waist-high water in New Orleans when they noticed trucks passing on an elevated part of Interstate 10. They raced to an on ramp, and a pickup truck already crammed with 16 people stopped.

The children's mother, Judy Foster, begged the passengers to make room for Edwina and Foster. According to a cousin, Carisa Carsice, who was with the group, Ms. Foster told the people on the truck: "Please watch them until we get to the Superdome. Please! Take the kids first, and I'll get on the next one."

Edwina said Thursday that when the truck took off, "We were going so fast and I felt like I wanted to jump off that truck to get back to her. But when we stopped, I looked down and there was too much water."

Edwina and Foster ended up in Houston, and, in a larger sense, were among the lucky ones. After a week of searching, the authorities located their mother at a shelter in Dallas, and plans were made on Friday to reunite the family.

In an area for lost children at the Reliant Center, next to the Astrodome, Edwina and Foster played with Queneisha White, 14. Queneisha fled rising waters in downtown New Orleans with a few teenage friends after her grandmother, with whom she lived, refused to leave her apartment in the Iberville Housing Project.

" I was so scared," Queneisha said. "I said, 'Grandma, lets go!' But she said she wanted to stay with her house. Well, I was scared and I didn't want to drown."

The group of friends walked to Algiers Point, on the west bank of the Mississippi River, and boarded buses to the Astrodome. Meanwhile, Queneisha's mother was being evacuated to Corpus Christi, Tex. Her grandmother's whereabouts remain unknown.

Late Thursday, Lee Reed, one of the men who had been working on Queneisha's case for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children used his own money to buy her a bus ticket to Corpus Christi.

"I couldn't find a way to get her down there, so I bought her a ticket myself," Mr. Reed said. "That's one of our concerns of the moment once we match people, not having the transportation to connect them. It's tragic."

Since arriving in Houston, Ms. Boyd, the woman searching for 16-month-old Torry Lee, said she that had received numerous offers for housing in other states, but that she did not want to leave the area without her whole family.

"We could be in a house right now, but I don't want to leave without my son," she said. "He was just a good baby. That's all I can say about him. A good baby."

It's heartbreaking. Everything, stressing about college applications, and things I've considered "problems" in my life seem so trivial and petty in comparison.

And the sorrow over this tragedy is easily translated into betrayal and frustration when it's all a few people's fault. Maureen Dowd's op-ed is worth reading:

I understand that politicians are wont to put cronies and cupcakes on the payroll.

I just wish they'd stop putting them on the Homeland Security payroll......

W. trusted [director of FEMA Michael Brown] "Brownie" simply because he was a friend of a friend. He was a college buddy of Joe Allbaugh, who worked as W.'s chief of staff when he was Texas governor and as his 2000 presidential campaign manager......

Time magazine reported that Brownie's official bio described his only stint in emergency management as "assistant city manager" in Edmond, Okla. But a city official told Time that the FEMA chief had been "an assistant to the city manager," which was "more like an intern."

Ever since W. was his father's loyalty enforcer, his political decisions have been shaped more by loyalty than substance or competence. Mr. Bush never did warm up to his first secretary of state because Colin Powell rebuffed appeals to help out in the Tallahassee recount of 2000......

FEMA was a disaster waiting to happen, the minute a disaster struck. As The Washington Post reported Friday, five of the eight top FEMA officials were simply Bush loyalists and political operatives who "came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters."

While many see the hideous rescue failures as disaster apartheid, Barbara Bush and other Republicans have tried to look on the bright side for the victims. The Wall Street Journal reported that Representative Richard Baker of Baton Rouge was overheard telling lobbyists: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

Even those who believe in intelligent design must surely agree that Brownie and Representative Baker weren't part of it.

This is outrageous. Political scientists (and pretentious commenters) will disagree about use of emotion and passion in political analysis. But this isn't a political analysis. It's MY interpretation of current/political events. Despite all the nicknames I've earned- "Belligerent Midget", "hand-grenade", etc.- I am everything but devoid of emotion. There's a human face to this national tragedy (I like to call it "George W. Bush"), just as there is "passion" in "compassion."