Katrina

Day two of Disaster theory was a very informative day. There was lots of stuff about theories, and disaster models, and other stuff that's not extremely interesting. We also had a discussion about disaster recovery and comparing that of first world to third world nations. We were given our assignment for this module, which so far seems very doable.

Before lunch we watched two short videos about hurricane Katrina. This is definitely an excellent example of everything we want to and are going to learn. What I didn't expect was while these videos played, I suddenly wished for a hole to open up in the floor, so that I could drop into it.
I felt so full of shame watching Americans struggle without hope from the government or each other. I watched helplessly at footage of the superdome and convention center that was simply awful. I know Katrina was awful, but for the first time I felt like I really stuck out as an American. They even showed all the moronic clips of Brown and Bush making stupid excuses about the response and scale of the problem and I just wanted to bang my head against the table.

In the end, no one called me out on it for which I was grateful, though we did have an interesting chat about it during lunch, as my British classmates were curious about my thoughts and I was curious about theirs. I was expecting to discuss Katrina, and I'm sure we will more in the future, but I wasn't expecting to feel so guilty about it.