in this issue

I SAT IN front of the TV and watched the sickening, horrifying images of the destruction of New Orleans – the floating corpses, the dying children, the people desperate for water and food – and I thought: This is like a third-world country. It's hard to believe it's happening in the United States.

And then the phrase from the newscasts kept ringing through my head: This is the worst urban disaster since the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

I decided to go to the store and buy more bottled water.

San Francisco and New Orleans are beautiful places, full of amazing people – and we're subject to forces of nature that we can't control. Someday, a devastating earthquake will hit the place where I live, and frankly, none of us are ready.

Really. None of us are ready. I mean that we're not ready as individuals, but we're clearly not ready as a society either. The Bush administration (and the larger neo-con theory that big government is bad, taxes should be low, and the private sector should handle the charity work) has left the infrastructure for disaster response in shambles.

A dose of reality here: As Michael Tisserand, editor of Gambit Weekly, in New Orleans, notes on page 11, you can't blame anyone for the storm. But you can blame Bush for the fact that five days later, people are dying because they don't have water, food, shelter, and medicine. In the United States.

The human damage is incalculable. The wreckage of historic New Orleans is unimaginable. But on a practical level, this country is going to have to spend perhaps $100 billion – and it won't be private-sector charity that covers the bill – to reconstruct an entire city for 500,000 people. This isn't an option. It simply has to happen.

Just to put it in perspective: That's about what we spend in a year fighting the war in Iraq.

In other words, we have the money. This is the richest nation in the history of the world. The problem isn't resources; it's priorities.

The only good news I can imagine coming out of this is that the disaster might finally make Americans realize how rotten the Bush agenda is, how it literally kills people. Natural disasters have toppled unconscionable regimes in the past. Perhaps the Republican Party of the United States is next on the list.

Tim Redmond

tredmond@sfbg.com