3/4/06 Initial reactions on travelling to gulf

This is not about theatre. This is a copy of a letter I've emailed to NYT columnist Nicholas Kristoff after having been on the Mississippi gulf coast and in New Orleans for two days:

Dear Mr. Kristof,

I've read and enjoyed your columns for a long time (if "enjoyed" is the right term for something that regularly raises my ire, indignation, and blood pressure at our constant failure to help the helpless). I admire the way you consistently shed light in dark places and humanize the sufferers. You do a great service.

I'm writing you from New Orleans to ask you to consider the forgotten here and on the gulf. I know the scale of suffering isn't the same as Darfur, to which you are returning, or Sri Lanka (I just watched your video report on the NYT website, and your call for Bush to lead a war on global poverty specific and right and an exercise in futility given his record). But the crisis for people here isn't over and the feeling is that the country has forgotten them. Sure, Mardi Gras was great and fun and a good thing for morale (especially for the people living in the small "isle of denial", where life has returned to some superficial semblance of normality), but:
-- Why are there people still living in tents in Pass Christian, in what looks for all the world like a U.N. refugee camp?
-- Why has the federal government apparently pulled out of recovery efforts, leaving only church groups to try to continue aiding the victims?
-- Why are so many people still "sitting in limbo", unable to know whether to come or go, rebuild or leave, ensnaired in endless coils of red tape? (I think the answer has a great deal to do with the kind of leadership at the very top that sends only one clear message resonating throughout the echelons of bureaucracy below: Cover Your Ass.)
-- Why do virtually all of my friends in this area, who continue to try to get through this day and the next, feel that the country has forgotten them, that the country thinks it's over?
-- Why are so many people looking at this mild winter with trepidation, thinking that the gulf waters are warming already, hurricane season is approaching, and expecting not only more and worse hurricanes but a full-blown epidemic of PTSS?
-- Why isn't there a Marshall Plan in full swing to bring this area back from the greatest natural disaster the country has known?
-- Why has not this administration been brought down (impeached, resigned, whatever) if for nothing else--and there's so much else--than a total and abject failure of leadership? What's happened to my country when smoke and mirrors so effectively substitue for accountability?

Mr. Kristoff, I'm writing to you because I admire you. I know the world and its attendant problems are huge, and the sight of that boy starving to death in Sri Lanka won't soon get out of my head (although I'm well aware that our powers of forgetting are also huge). You must be exhausted from trying to do so much. I'm just asking that you also consider shedding a little light on the people undergoing this particular ongoing crisis which, like so many, seems in danger of being forgotten.

Thanks very much, and please keep doing what you're doing.

Yours,

Graham Paul