Finger-pointing May Be Needed

I just got in my e-mail an article by Don Gaetz, superintending of Okaloosa County schools. You can find the article at A Port in the Storm on Gulf1 web site.

Now before I get to my point, let me first say that I am fully in support of what Don Gaetz said about the response here in northwest Florida. The actions I know of in response to Hurricane Katrina have been exceptionally good. The Okaloosa county school system, and its superintendent Don Gaetz are to be congratulated.

But there is a problem with the response to this disaster. It has pointed out serious problems with our system, and our ability to respond to natural disasters as well as terrorist attacks. We need to improve quite a number of things, not the least of these being our ability to respond flexibly in an emergency situation. Flexible response is not a natural ability of the bureaucracy, but it is something that we need.

This suggests one thing we need to look at: Keeping the bureaucracy from interfering with private efforts at relief. During a disaster career bureaucrats often try to keep up all the same standards of safety and health that they would outside of a disaster. It’s a nice thought. We don’t want to increase the death toll by being careless. But when the situation is bad, often the best way to improve it is to take risks. People who are capable of taking these risks and more importantly capable to deciding to take these risks should be permitted to take them.

But real solutions aren’t going to be found during this short time following the disaster. We can talk about who should be fired, who should be moved, or who is doing a good job. But especially in the giant Department of Homeland Security, there should be an investigation–a professional investigation–to determine what went wrong and who was responsible. That is, who was actually responsible, not who can be made to take the blame. I would suggest that such a professional review could be reviewed by congress and by the executive branch, but an investigation by congressional committee would largely give politicians a chance to posture, rather than actually getting the truth. Let disaster response officials from various parts of the country be made into a panel to look at the situation.

President Bush said that the results weren’t acceptable. At the same time he congratulated all those involved. Well, if everyone was doing things right, then the results would have to be acceptable. Somebody didn’t get the job done. Maybe there were many somebodies. I’m concerned with two possibilities: 1) That we will not manage to correct the very real problems that have been found, or 2) That we will place blame on people who were, in fact, doing the best that they could.

People whose political friends are in power tend to tell us not to point fingers. Those whose enemies are in power tend to say, “Throw the bastards out!” What we need to do is investigate carefully and throw the right people out, while thanking and congratulating the ones who did not live up to justified expectations about their performance.

Finally, I think we need to be more, not less demanding of our political leaders. Politicians make big claims and big promises, which they regularly fail to fulfill. We need to hold them to those promises, or use our power as voters to turn them out. I suspect that if we did start holding politicians to their promises they would make less of them, and start telling us more realistically what they can actually accomplish.