My View: Hurricane Aid -- Where Is It?

By: News Director Bob Longo

Where is the airlift? Where is the water? The food? Why has it taken nearly an entire week for our federal government to respond with help on the ground to the hundreds of thousands of Americans struggling to survive along the Gulf Coast? Tangible help. The kind you can drink and eat. Not words, fly-bys and news conferences. Food and water are needed. Today. Now.

Was everyone in Washington asleep at the wheel all week? On vacation? Where has Congress been? The President told us yesterday supplies are coming. When? Why aren't they trickling in now?

Americans are dying in third world conditions in the United States. With no coordinated effort to bring water and food to the needy for days, we have made their struggle to survive more difficult and created an atmosphere that fosters desperation and lawlessness.

I want to see helicopters dropping food and water on the overpasses and along roadsides, on rooftops and wherever throngs have gathered. I want to see it now. Today. I don't want to hear about the plan, I want to see the action. Americans are faced with unimaginable horrors and we have the resources to help them now. The government has the resources to coordinate and deliver. It needs to happen now.

I want to see truckloads of armed U.S. soldiers keeping the peace. I want to see M.A.S.H unit tents and Red Cross field hospitals set up where these people have gathered. I want to know that these people are being helped.

You'd want the same, wouldn't you? No matter where you live, if a natural disaster took everything ... everything ... wouldn't you expect help within a day or so?

A healthy person can't survive without water after a few days. But there are thousands of babies, elderly people, families...thousands of people ... your fellow Americans who have done just that.... gone about as far as they can go before they drop. Where is the help?

I want to see the full strength, force and might of the American government and private sector bearing down on helping these fellow Americans survive the day and have a tomorrow to look forward to.

Get on the phone and call your congressional office, the White House ... anyone you can think of and tell them to help now. Today. Tomorrow may be too late.