Despite the currently popular cant about everything from Katrina to Iraq that we "can't look back, we have to look forward", we have evidence this week that knowing what went wrong is essential to know how to proceed constructively. The jury in the case of the tragic deaths of the frail and sick elderly residents of St. Rita's nursing home in St. Bernard Parish rendered its verdict, siding with a defense that blamed, with the help of expert testimony, the federal government for the shoddy and unprofessional design and construction flaws that doomed the levee and floodwall system. And the Dutch government announced its plan for a new 200-year plan for water defenses in an age of rising sea levels. Money quote from this article:
But the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina also spurred the Dutch into a new round of reflection and preparations, including drawing up worst-case scenario plans for evacuations -- unthinkable politically just a few years ago.
Somehow the Dutch found it useful to look back in order to plan two centuries into the future. Is there any institution in this country, private or public, that can even conceive of planning in that kind of time frame? This is a next-quarter, next-election culture, private and public, and--as the St. Rita's jury found--that kind of short-range thinking can and will have tragic consequences for us.