Month: September 2005

politics

These People Are Not Refugees, They Are American Citizens

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Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick from Detroit, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus just said in a speech aired on CNN,

“We come to you this morning as a sense of urgency. First of all, these people are not refugess, they are American citizens. They pay taxes, they raise their families, they help America grow and I wish the media would called them American citizens and not refugess which relegates them to another whole status.“

Well, well said. I will be noting which channels and media outlets refer to these people as refugees from now on. See also said that Detroit is offering to airlift out 500 families immediately and to house and feed them. That is probably around 2000 people. While that isn’t a whole lot, if a few more cities did the same we would have one issue resolved immediately.

politics

Margins Of Society at Center of Tragedy

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Now this is where the story gets really political: many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy are people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society. Poverty exhibits a bizarre sense of equality – the poor, white and black, are now equally suffering. Here are just a few views on this aspect of the southern situation:

  • Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx wrote, “Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws? If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions.”
  • “We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random,” said Martin Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts and poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto Rican. “Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It’s dangerous to be poor. It’s dangerous to be black. It’s dangerous to be Latino.””Everything is God’s will,” said Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. “But there’s a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things.” That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve of crisis. “Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor,” he said. “So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It’s as simple as that.”
ramblings

Fallujah, LA (formerly known as New Orleans)

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It just keeps getting worse and worse. If I were to tell you about a city that: has no power, has no clean water, has no food, has no working infrastructure, consists mainly of rubble, has dead bodies laying about in the streets, has rampant lawlessness, is controlled by armed bands of people roving the streets and has people shooting at helicopters you might name a city in Iraq. You would never have named a U.S. city, until today that is: what I just described is happening RIGHT NOW in New Orleans. The reason why the scariest horror stories to me are books like The Stand and movies like 28 Days Later is because our society is so loosely held together – in the end it only takes so very little to rip it all to shreds. The animal side of humanity can take over so quickly and things can go from bad to worse to atrocious in no time. We are seeing this first hand by watching Nawlins become a third world country.

This is from an AP report dated today, filed at 2:02 PM:

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
“I don’t treat my dog like that,” 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “I buried my dog.” He added: “You can do everything for other countries but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can’t get them down here.”

To echo those sentiments, the NY Times published an absolutely scathing editorial lambasting our dear President’s performance over the past few days. To give you an idea of how angry the Times (and I am) is, here are the first 2 sentences:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed.

Again, we’re told with a smirk that everything will be alright by someone who has less than zero credibility. Where is the LA National Guard, which could have been deployed to help prevent what has happened from happening? Oh yeah, they are fighting a losing war in Iraq. The authorities should have very quickly realized that the poorest and most desperate (not just before this storm hit mind you) part of the city’s population was not leaving. Its tough to think that your citizens will become animals but you always have to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Seems as if that wasn’t done that well down south from where I’m sitting.