I can imagine this as a tragedy exacerbated at a bureaucratic level. A paperwork level. Not just that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, but that there are ways and means and routings and chains of command and Standard Operating Procedures and culpability issues and legal responsibility and payment and logistics. The left hand, faced with the information and situation as it can see it, doesn't know if the right hand is doing something which would render the left hand's efforts useless. The left hand doesn't know if corporate donations need to be cleared through the elbow (as it were) or the shoulder, because of the tax situation. Can something it can pick up and do something with counteract or damage what the right hand is doing?
And at the end of the day, is the left hand going to get into trouble for this?
Mismanagement. Unpreparedness. Fear. Overreaction. Abandonment. Tragedy.
And a solid, sluggish and pigheaded lack of movement to do anything to change these things as they emerged.
Politically, I am disgusted, emotionally, I am fraught and shocked, and intellectually I am stunned that this occurence was not acted on when it was foreseen, that it was not accounted for, nor laid down in plan.
K and I have donated to the Red Cross.
If you can and you haven't, you should.
And even when the hands do actually do something, the head doesn't seem to have been involved at all.
It's all so frustratingly disorganised. Doesn't it make you want to drive down there and start sorting things out? You, with your charm and politeness, could be just the person they need.