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Katrina, Five Years Later

I have a dream that I can go back to my home, that I can go back to New Orleans.

I have a dream, a dream filled with hopes.

I hope my daddy is safe.

I hope we can have a clean New Orleans again, that New Orleans can go back to the way it was.

I hope that all the people will be safe and protected.

I Have A Dream

This was the dream shared by the 2005-2006 kindergarten class at New Orleans West KIPP Academy in Houston, Texas—children who had just fled everything familiar in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Five years later, for many of Katrina's children and families home is still not back to the way it was. New roadblocks keep appearing on the road to recovery. As the recent report The New Orleans Index at Five puts it, "It has been often said that New Orleanians are resilient. They have to be after being dealt three crises in five years—Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaches, the Great Recession, and now the [BP] oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico . . . New Orleans is in the throes of post-disasters recovery." The city's resilience is still strong, but challenges remain.

Glenn Beck’s Phony Regret

A day after his "Restoring Honor" rally in the nation's capitol, Glenn Beck said that he regretted calling President Obama a racist. But that new claim looks like another part of Beck's apparent plan to dupe the nation into believing that he is not the divisive figure that he has already proven himself to be.

After repeatedly rationalizing and restating his obviously-false assertion that Mr. Obama "has a deep-seated hatred of white people or white culture" Beck told fellow Fox News host Chris Wallace that he was wrong to use the R-word. Of course, the muck-raking conservative broadcaster didn't apologize – he's too self-righteous, agenda-driven and, I believe, too insincere for that. Beck claimed that he simply chose his words poorly. The exchange between Beck and Wallace on "Fox News Sunday":

WALLACE: "Do you regret having called [Obama] a racist and saying he had a deep seated hatred for white people?"

BECK: "Of course I do. I don't want to retract the, um ... I want to amend that I think it is much more of a theological question, that he is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim. 'Racist,' first of all, it shouldn't have been said. It was poorly said. I have a big fat mouth sometimes and I say things. That's just not the way people should behave. And it was not accurate. It is liberation theology that has shaped his world view."

That whack excuse doesn't even begin to sound honest. Does Beck actually expect us to believe that he intended to say "liberation theology" but his tongue slipped and accidentally blurted out the words "racist" and "deep-seated hatred for white people?" Please.

Doors of Opportunity Closing

Somewhere I read that countries usually have few choices on which to spend their limited resources. Someone put it simply by saying it usually is a choice between guns or butter. I would add it's either guns, butter, or education.

America under the Bush administration chose to buy guns with their limited resources. Now America is suffering from lack of butter, housing, healthcare and educational opportunities. America went another step and not only decided to spend all of our money on war, i.e., guns, but we outsourced the butter to other countries because we thought they could make it cheaper. The question is, "Is it really cheaper in the long run when we won't even have the jobs to make the money to buy the guns or butter?" It's called, "Depression."

When we look at what is going on in our communities we see a shocking misuse of resources. This is especially true in the field of education. Education is the thing that has kept America ahead of the world and now young people trying to go to college are faced with a large number of, sometimes, insurmountable obstacles above getting passing grades.

The elementary middle and high schools are lagging behind and not adequately preparing our young people to get to the next level of schooling. Once they get through these first steps there is the next hurdle to get over; that is deciding what college to go to and getting into the college of their choice. Next they have to get the funding for college and then the classes that they need to get through to the degree they want. Oh yes, I nearly forgot, once they get the degree, what about a job that has not been outsourced to another country?