Katrina Stuart Quotes

Remember during the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, those images of people on their roofs while makeshift boats full of people sailed by? Well, this is my boat-people analogy. We’ve been flooded and I’m in a boat that’s gliding by everyone I know on top of those roofs. But my boat only holds fifteen people. I got my girls, my family, my closest friends. When your boat is full, it’s not like you’re saying to everyone else on those roofs, “I don’t care about you.” It’s just that these are my boat people and I’ve gotta save them. Because they’re in the fight with me. This is crucial: When you take on cancer, you’re not alone. Of course, that’s not how it feels when you first hear those words: “You have cancer.” At that moment, you feel more alone than you’ve ever been. You’re standing in place, numb, and the world is rushing by.

The massive breakdown of disaster relief with Hurricane Katrina was rooted in state and local governmental agencies’ and elected officials’ lying to the public for decades. Read the Brookings Institution’s list “Government’s Most Visible Failures, 2001–2014”; it is a heartbreaking accumulation of avoidable tragedies and misery in just that short period, almost all rooted in some large, fundamental miscalculation.

This was fine with Katrina Vross, a weary, short, baggy-eyed chain-smoker with the put-upon air of many Russian bureaucrats whose attitude suggested that any question you might ask was a major imposition on their time, a reflection of your own stupidity, and a confirmation that life was an endless series of debilitating repetitions.