Name: Thomas S. Johnson
Hometown: Elizabethtown, KY
Classification: English Graduate Assistant

Early on the morning of September 3, I tried to get in touch with various agencies charged with administering relief in times of public need. This was, of course, the Saturday after hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast, flooding New Orleans, leaving thousands of people stranded and in need, and destroying property and taking lives in many other towns and cities, as well. I was calling to find out how I might help.
The local Red Cross line was set to an after hours answering service. Not what I was looking for.
The state police were answering the phone, but had no answers to questions about how people could help or even who we could call to find out those answers.
And the Salvation Army had a phone jockey on duty who, besides not knowing the answers to questions himself, would not even take the ten seconds it might take to pass on to a Joe Schmo like me a national number I might call. He repeatedly told me to call back during ‘normal business hours,’ though I cited to him that I didn’t believe the people in New Orleans were waiting to die during normal business hours. This guy (whose name he was not willing to provide when I asked) was so unwilling to answer a fairly simple question — “What’s the Salvation Army’s national number? — that he hung up on me all four times I called and he threatened three times to call the police and report me, presumably, for some form of harassment on my part of a supposedly charitable organization.
Of course, the police already knew I was looking for information on how I could help. Perhaps that is why no officer ever showed up at my door.
This situation strikes me as indicative of the botched response to the disaster of hurricane Katrina. Not to rehash what many others have been saying for days, but 50,000-plus people literally stranded without food, water or adequate toilet facilities is a travesty anywhere. On U.S. soil, it is a complete befuddlement and causes this writer to take pause and ask a question that deserves answering: “What the hell went wrong or didn’t happen in planning for this thing?”
This thing that was so sure to happen that the media was in and around New Orleans the Saturday evening thirty-six hours before Katrina hit . . . though for some reason our nation’s president could not be bothered with a trip to the affected region until over four days after the hurricane made landfall.
Whatever the answers to that question may be, they lie in the future. For the present, I wonder why organizations like the Salvation Army are threatening police action against those expressing an interest in helping. I wonder why Florida airboats that could carry supplies and people, and whose owners have already stocked them with food and water and say that they are ready to head up to New Orleans, are being held up by lack of FEMA clearance.
I wonder why our supposed solidarity as Americans is somehow now become ignorance or apathy or class pride or whatever it is that is right now making those suffer and starve who most need and, therefore, most deserve aid from this, what many maintain is the greatest country on earth, America.