Here’s to opening of a great Blog post by Sen. Russ Feingold (via the Huffington Post):
Our Duty to the People of the Gulf Coast
After Banda Aceh in Indonesia was devastated by a horrific tsunami in 2004, the people there faced the challenge of rebuilding and restarting their lives. That is the same challenge that people on the Gulf Coast are facing today. I visited Banda Aceh earlier this year on a trip to Indonesia, and earlier this week I visited some of the neighborhoods ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
I was struck by what the people in Banda Aceh and New Orleans had in common, both because of what they went through, and because of the incredible resilience they have shown in the wake of those tragedies. But I was just as struck by how those places differed – especially how, in many ways, New Orleans seemed worse off than Banda Aceh did a year after the disaster.
When I visited Banda Aceh in February 2006 – a little over a year after the original tsunami hit – though many of the reconstruction programs had yet to be completed, there was visible progress being made, thanks in large part to the generosity of the American taxpayer. I saw homes, roads, buildings, and bridges being built with funds that the American government generously gave to the victims of the tsunami…”