Excellent Questions

A few of the 25 questions are a little out there, but some of the rest raise some interesting points.

Louisiana Weekly - Your Community. Your Newspaper.: "21. Where were FEMA's several dozen vaunted urban search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by volunteers who towed their own boats into the city after hearing an appeal on television.

22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals by local volunteers to send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money to the Red Cross?

23. Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?

24. As politicians talk about 'disaster czars' and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed 'new urbanism' in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city's ordinary citizens in their own future?

25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, what has happened to democracy?"

When we were stationed in Germany in 1976 I didn't receive my absentee ballot until two days after the election, I was irritated and put it down to the US Mail. Now I wonder. I've been asking myself if my vote mattered ever since I worked on John Anderson's campaign in 1980. I left work at five to go vote and the election had already been called. I tend to vote first thing in the morning now so that I have the illusion that my vote counts. I live in California and though we have many electoral votes we don't seem to actually matter. Our primary isn't until June so we get the voting leftovers. You know the ones who have money left over to still support their name being on the ballot? At least we get to vote.

So far.