not big on sensitivity

Katrina’s been downgraded to a category 3. Meteorologists and National Hurricane Center officials have been saying given Katrina’s potential for destruction, the Gulf coast is experiencing the best of the worst-case scenarios. That may be true, and we are all grateful that New Orleans has not gone the way of Atlantis, but “it could a been much worse!” doesn’t put enough emphasis on how bad it is, and that it is far form over. A week’s worth of heavy rain could and would do an equal amount of damage to a city below sea level as the worst-case they avoided. Not to mention the ‘luck’ of a diverted storm path simply means the brunt of the disaster happens to the unlucky somewhere else.

I’m just cranky because that “it could have been worse” crap makes my blood boil. What a useless, cruel, stupid thing to say. We heard a lot of that here in NYC after 9/11…“If the towers had been hit an hour later, the buildings would have been filled and thousands more would have died. It could have been much worse.” Imagine hearing that shit three days after your daughter leapt eighty stories to her death.

Or imagine being one of the evacuated, waiting in a shelter of some kind, a sports dome that may, or may not have its roof torn off any moment, having left behind everything you own, no idea if you will have a house to return to, a CITY to return to (and I cannot bring myself to think about the thousands of house-pets and livestock that were left to perish) and hear officials describe the devastation as “The best of the worst case scenarios” before they segue into the dollar amounts of damage. How totally, utterly cruel.