I heard a name tonight on Rachel Maddow’s show I hadn’t thought about in years. Kirstjen Nielsen. Pleasant, attractive person, I’m told. Pleasant, attractive person with the blood of 2,000* of my fellow New Orleanians on her hands.
Ms. Nielsen was, in 2005, the White House point person on emergency preparedness and response. Her job was to cut through the bureaucratic turf wars and conflicting information in emergencies so that the president’s office could properly direct resources to save American lives in the event of catastrophe.
Whether she simply did not believe the reports of broken levees and chaos in the Superdome and convention center, whether she simply couldn’t get George Bush to brave the protesters at Camp Casey outside his “ranch” in Crawford or simply judged the inundation of our city not important enough to bring it up, the message that thousands of Americans were facing certain doom didn’t sink in.
Last night I learned something I should have noticed when it was first announced last week: Donald J. Trump has nominated Ms. Nielsen to head the Department of Homeland Security.
Now, I’ve heard the arguments for Ms. Nielsen. “She’s taken the lessons to heart.” “No better teacher than failure.” Fine. Let her take those lessons to the private sector.
But for this administration to put this person, whose negligence or incompetence brought about the deaths of my friends, my neighbors, and paved the way for disaster capitalists to utterly reshape the culture of America’s most original, diverse and culturally real city pisses on the graves of those who died here.
I wish Ms. Nielsen all the best in her future endeavors.
Running DHS should not be one of them.
I understand there a lot of people and programs to #resist right now, and that all of us are a bit tired, but please, contact your senators and ask them to oppose this nomination. Don’t let what happened to my town, what’s happening right now to the people of Puerto Rico, happen to your town.
* The official toll from Katrina is 1800. That number is not true. In October of 2005, I sat at my kitchen table with my exhausted neighbor. Her employer, one of the large funeral homes in the city, had called her back to work in September, having set up a trailer for her to live in. She told me that facility alone had processed over 2,000 bodies.
Note: Richard Cranium pointed out that FEMA already has a director, Long. Nielsen has been nominated for DHS head. You know, airport security, ICE and all that. We are screwed.