Some good from the MSM
September 9th, 2005 by JoshAnderson Cooper has continuously impressed me during the past week with his honesty, probity, and grace. While much of CNN’s coverage has been repetitive (as is the nature of 24 hour cable news), leaving me feeling enraged and disgusted, his has been moving and informative.
I just watched a remarkable piece Cooper did with Dr. Greg Henderson, a pathologist, touring the now abandoned New Orleans Convention Center. Henderson arrived at the Convention Center two days after the storm, hoping to aid other doctors he expected to already be working. He arrived to find 15-20,000 people with no medicine, no help, and no law enforcement. He was the only doctor there.
“That’s where the real hell was. This is where hell opened its mouth….People were sleeping everywhere, packed everywhere in here, all the way out to the street. It was just a mass of humanity.”
He went on to describe the only other healthcare there: a man with a few IV bags and no tubing or needles, who had to resort to pouring the liquid directly into people’s mouth. His voice broke as he showed Anderson the area where he’d heard many stories of women being dragged to and raped. Henderson picked up the tiny red shoes of a little boy and told Cooper how there were children everywhere, some laughing and playing, glad that they weren’t at school, while others lay on the floor siezing and dying.
All that’s left now in the Convention Center is trash and two abandoned dogs. As Brian Williams echoed on last night’s Daily Show, “How could this happen in America?”
