I've more-or-less kept quiet on this site about what I think regarding Katrina and Rita. I pulled on impassioned post almost as quickly as I put it up and I have a couple others in my drafts bin, probably never to see the light of day. I am reluctant to say much because I don't think that there's a dialogue as much as a bunch of folks shouting from the rooftops with megaphones, passionately screaming how this completely validates whatever they thought before the storms even struck. I continue to believe that a lot of people - on both the right and left - would rather shout themselves hoarse than re-evaluate their beliefs enough to understand that crappy things happen and it's not always the other team's fault and your team did not do (or would not do given the opportunity) everything as well as it could have.

Time passes, though, and these days I'm only a little annoyed at those who suggest that the massive traffic buildups caused by over 2.5 million people leaving a city in the course of 48 hours is evidence of gross incompetence on the part of... well, somebody, preferably someone they didn't like before Rita was even christened. As this was Houston's first large-scale evacuation in decades it's a little bit idealistic, in my view, to expect things to go great. The lesson for Katrina was "Everybody get the hell out!" while the lesson for Rita was "Well maybe not everybody!" and "don't forget the contraflow!"

Every mistake, I think, is determined to lead to another mistake of the opposing variety. Unless, of course, enough time has passed that we forgot the original mistake enough to repeat it.

I carry no water for Houston Mayor Bill White or Texas Governor Rick Perry. I voted for Perry, reluctantly, based almost entirely on political ideas and not out of any affection for him (I voted against him in 1998). I didn't vote in the Houston mayoral elections, though if I had I don't know who I would have voted for. I disagree with a lot of White's ideas, but I get the sense of a competent man doing a decent job. I've voted for Harris County Judge Eckles on an occasion or two, but he never faced much in the way of serious opposition. If none of these men are in office two years from now I would likely not really care (depending, of course, on who succeeds them).

I spent much of Thursday worried sick about my brother, headed for San Antonio when there was a hurricane headed right for Galveston Bay. I wasn't stuck out there, but I am not dispassionate about the possibility that things could have gone very, very badly.

But from where I stand the officials involved at least served up par. I know a lot of people are irate, but it's my belief that a lot of people have lost sight that hurricanes suck and they’re difficult to deal when people haven’t in a time, and asking for comfort in the face of Category 5 (or a Cat 4) is asking too much. I'm not saying that things could not have gone better nor that we should not work to improve the plan and make it better, just that this was inherently going to be chaotic.

Katrina helped in terms of dusting off the emergency plans, but it’s also made everything a lot more stressful (As Ethan says, "We've seen this movie before"). They’re all politicians and they all want to avoid the blame that was flung at New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. The fact that so many have basically accused Nagin, Blanco, FEMA, and Bush of murder for failure to act did little to keep heads level this time around. That's not to defend those involved in Katrina, but it is to say that a lot of the rhetoric is utterly unhelpful even when true. Holding a leader accountable for each and every last one of its citizens is unrealistic in the extreme.

The object lesson here for me is that these guys can’t win. Many say Louisiana waited too long to call the evacuation and now many are suggesting that Texas called it too early. Too many people left behind followed by too many people on the road. Officials from all levels were seemingly too lax in Louisiana and it appears they may have been too spastic in Texas. And too slow. And just... imperfect, dammit.

One of the reasons that I fall to the right of center is that I don't expect terribly much from our government. I expect better than Bush's appointments for FEMA, but on the whole I'm not so much outraged that so little was done as I am that the government is spending so much to do so little. It's a point-of-view that I am beginning to understand to be irreconcilable to those on the left. I haven't much interest in having that fight, but Rita at least gave me a clearer idea of where the battle lines are drawn. Rita let me understand that for the outraged on the left it was not all about getting Bush like it seemed to be. They honestly have expectations that they dare to hold even though I personally find them to be unreasonable. I needed to see that, even though I don't know what to do with it having done so.

We've got to get better at this in the ways that we can do better than this. Even though I don't believe it to be nearly as simple as critics of the Houston evacuation believe it to be, maybe there are ways that we can get contraflow open sooner. There ought to be ways to get gas out there quicker. By all means, let's have this conversation. But let's look at the big picture. Let's look at what worked as well as what didn't. Let's look at things we didn't even think about that may be perfectly obvious in hindsight. But that's not going to happen as long as the media and the critics are focused solely on what went wrong. As the Katrina-to-Rita transition demonstrated, in my mind, that only leads to the equal-and-opposing mistakes.

Now, being a heartless, short-sighted conservative, my main interest begins in Houston and ends in Texas (okay, I guess considering my betrothed, ends in Lousiana). That's where Houstonians (even ones that live in Idaho) need to focus. Miamians need to focus on Miami, Mobilians (??) on Mobile, and so on. Just like those on the left seem to honestly believe that the government can work at a level I find to be unrealistic, I hope they understand that I (and many others on the right) honestly believe that this is best handled on the local level with federal assistance but not federal direction. I would honestly rather former Houston Mayor Lee P. Brown lead the evacuation than President George W. Bush.

President Bush has heeded the cries of those who hold the federal government accountable and wants to take complete control of the situation. I'm tempted to say that his critics should be careful what they ask for, but that's not very helpful. Instead I will simply say that I believe that the federal government's ability to handle the situation (under any administration) is limited and that I hope to God that city and state officials are figuring out what to do on their own if and when the federal government is slow to respond. And I hope that individual citizens are trying to figure out what they should do if and when the state and local governments are slow to respond.

I am not very hopeful on all this. While the post-Rita-evac recriminations help me understand how minds that work differently from my own work, it also points out that people are, in general, reactive. We want everything to go flawlessly. When things don't happen that way, we go after one another. We're either too lackadaisal in the face of disaster or we're too panicky. We're whatever we shouldn't have been because that's the only reason that people could be deathly uncomfortable for hours or days on end and could die. Ordinarily I might appreciate a public that refuses to accept things as they are, but in this case they want someone else to change it. And we seem to declare it in such a way that assures we will never get it.

Every now and again I will look back at something I wrote a few years ago and be astounded that I wrote it. I will be astonished at how wrong I was. I really hope that a couple years from now I will look back at this post in a similar manner.