Please remember that you are choosing to read my opinions.

(I edited it. I apologize for not knowing the difference between a levee and a dam. I...uhh... live on a mountain.)

It's true. I haven't been around much to talk about world events. I didn't talk about the hurricane because everyone is talking about this tragedy. If you don't know that you should do something or where you can go to find out where to donate money then you just haven't been paying much attention to the internet, television, radio, and random people on the street. It's true that we have a crisis, and that a tragedy has happened. It's also true that many things were revealed because of this tragedy that has some people upset.

The hurricane that swept through New Orleans did more than ravage the land and the people that lived there. It exposed more than the infrastructure of buildings and broke down more than just a levee. That hurricane swept through New Orleans and ravaged the way people think. It exposed the poverty of the people living there; it broke down the idea that there is no discrimination in this day and age. It revealed that our country has bad habits, and that bad habits die hard. We still want to put band-aids on severed limbs and pretend that no one is bleeding.

Some people say that there was no way that fixing the levee would have saved anyone from what Katrina brought to the table. It seems that every year someone mentioned that the levee needed restoration. Logically, over time, our country's infrastructure is going to degrade. The problem is, as usual, priority. There is no priority to fix these problems before the crisis. Does no one expect anything before the crisis? Playing politics is still more important than doing what is truly needed. What is necessary to politics is what is now, not what is tomorrow. The system breeds this attitude naturally. Politicians aren't in office forever so they deal with immediate issues first, no matter how irrelevant that they turn out to be. You can't blame them, but you can blame how we breed them, and we can blame ourselves.

138,000/485,000

Numbers are funny things, aren't they? They can't really lie, but they can be used deviously. They can be used to make a point, or they can cause headaches while pounding out pointless math homework. Maybe math isn't so pointless, though. The numbers I've written for you is an estimate of how many people living in New Orleans were poor out of how many people lived there. Think about those numbers and think about how many homes were lost, and how many people have died.

Think about how many ideas died with those people.