Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “if you do not mind if I jump in, I want to just caution people listening tonight, our colleagues, our leadership…”

“if you do not mind if I jump in, I want to just caution people listening tonight, our colleagues, our leadership, because when you have a disaster or anything of the proportion in size that Katrina was, it is hard to get your mind around it, especially if you have not been there. You now have direct, first- person ability to relay and understand the depth of what happened. Most of us have only seen the aftermath on TV. The danger that we have in front of us is that with every passing day that Katrina's hitting is behind us, we are in danger of the American public and us as leaders becoming desensitized. The more it is on the news, the more we hear about it, the more we read about it, it is just the human psyche is such that you cannot have that raw nerve scratched every day and not steel yourself against it. With that desensitization, we are in danger of not having an appropriate response come out of this body, and we have got to come together. We come here every week and we stand up and we point out our very clear differences with our friends on the other side of the aisle, but it does not have to be this way with the response to Katrina. There are some specific action items that can and should be done in order to prevent ourselves from becoming desensitized, not just as policy-makers but in the general populace as well. We need the press.…”