Katrina used to be a perfect name for a beautiful baby girl.

Now the name Katrina conjures up feelings of pain and suffering in the hearts of those affected by the now-famous storm of the same name.

Tonight at 9 p.m., HBO will air one-half of the four hour documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” with the second half to be shown tomorrow at the same time. The film will air in its entirety on August 29, the one year anniversary of the disaster.

Director Spike Lee is back on the scene, directing what may turn out to be his most powerful film yet.

“Levees” is a historical piece, which documents the lives of those affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. But the film also is surrounded by controversy, as the film proclaims racial bias was to blame for the government’s slow response time.

Lee, when asked why he thinks the response was what it was, quoted another celebrity who stirred up controversy a year ago with a statement on NBC during a live telethon to raise money for Katrina victims.

“Well, I would just say, what Kanye West expressed, that George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

As with any argument, immediately writing off the film because of its accusations of racial bias is careless.

Already on message boards people are speaking out against Lee and “Levees” for that exact reason.

Was it a coincidence that the slow response happened in an area that was predominantly African-American?

Evidence points heavily towards “Yes.”

In that same interview with HBO, Lee draws an example from another recent natural disaster.

“Recently, there was another horrific earthquake, a national disaster in Indonesia. And, once again, the United States government was there within two days. Now it’s great that we were in Indonesia in two days. But…let’s get a globe, and see what the distance between the United States and Indonesia, and to New Orleans, and the people in the whole Gulf region.”

Why was the response to Indonesia much faster and more thorough than the U.S. response to Katrina victims? Is it a coincidence that the most affected region, the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, is also populated by impoverished African-Americans?

If the Katrina-affected regions were populated by middle- and upper-class white persons, an outcry of wrongdoing would be much louder and heard at the higher levels.
Who can deny that money makes people move faster?

But the fact is, fellow Americans lost family and friends in what was part caused by a storm, and part by neglect from the higher-ups after. The least we can do is hear the story.

More recently the government acknowledged that the levees which broke during the storm were not properly kept, and were the reason for the magnitude of loss following the storm.

Losses could have been prevented and lives could have been saved had the government spent more time immediately helping victims, rather than debating who is at fault for the blatant neglect.

Too often politicians try to shift blame in order to clear their own image of wrongdoing, in order to stay in power. But at some point it is more important to just take care of the American people who elect leaders, and voters will in turn be grateful.

What’s over is over, and the film hopes to make light of Hurricane Katrina, so a similar mistake will not be made.

The worst act of all following Katrina would be not learning from what went wrong and the mistakes that were made.

Record numbers of supporters sent in donations and volunteered to help with the devastated regions, but “Americans have very, very short attention spans,” according to Lee. “Levees” looks to bring the Gulf region back into the public eye and back in the public’s minds.

“I think when we look back on this many years from now, I’m confident that people are gonna see what happened in New Orleans as a defining moment in American history. Whether that’s pro or con is yet to be determined.”

Even though the levees failed to support the city of New Orleans, the government should go out of its way to make sure that they are never caught in the same position because that would be the definition of “un-American.”