CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States
There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .
Hurricane Katrina: The Whole World Has Gone Mad
this entry brought to you by tricky, "evolution revolution love"
For the past few days I've wanted nothing but to write about Hurricane Katrina, but I haven't been able to come up with the words. Or rather, lots of words have to come to me, with no organization.
I'm scared. Sometimes it feels like the world is going to end. Sometimes I feel like my grandmother was right. This is it. We are seeing the end of days. I know it's not, because there was never more than a decade in human history where it didn't feel like everything was going to end.
And yet, here we are. Terrorist attacks in New York. An unnecessary and illegal war in Iraq. The Washington DC sniper. Soaring, unstable gas prices. Stolen elections. Terrorist attacks in London. A tsunami that wiped out thousands. 600 recently dead and another 300 injured in a religious procession in Iraq. And now... Hurricane Katrina. Thousands homeless. Starved. Dehydrated.
Sometimes I feel like the whole world has gone mad.
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It's come up a lot. I've read it in blogs and in news links. A lot of people think it's a race thing. They say, if this had happened in Seattle or if it had happened in Beverly Hills, the government would have responded immediately and swiftly, instead of letting American people dehydrate to death.
I don't believe it's a race thing, though, I honestly don't. If this had happened in anywhere else in the country, the government, Bush and his cabal, would have reacted exactly like they did here. With heinous, incomprehensible ineptitude. But you know what the difference is? If this had happened to Beverly Hills, California and the government reacted as slowly and stupidly as possible-- which they would have-- nobody, but nobody would make excuses for Bush. Nobody would say "Well, he's just one man," and nobody would say "What else could have been done?" and nobody would ask "How can you possibly be mad at Bush?" and nobody would blame the victims. If this had happened with rich white people, he wouldn't get away with it. But this happened to the very poor. It happened to the black. He will get away with it because people will let him get away with it.
Our government and our President received multiple documented warnings about September 11th, and chose to do nothing about them. Thousands of people died. Thousands. Then our government and our President lied. And when lying didn't work, they made flimsy, unbelievable excuses that would get your boss canned if he tried pulling it on his superiors.
Our government and our President received multiple, documented warnings saying that Louisiana would be wiped out if nothing was done about the levees. A report from FEMA in 2001 said that the three most likely devastating events to America would be a terrorist attack on New York, an earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane in Louisiana. Bush responded by turning FEMA from a cabinet-level-department to a section of Homeland Security. Then they cut the funding of Lousiana's levee maintenance by half.
And then, in the wake of all the horror, as America lost people and millions of dollars in values, Bush got on Good Morning America and he lied. Again. "No one expected the levees to break," he said. This after multiple warnings to the contrary.
He lied. When America's southern coast drowned and the remainders starved and dehydrated, he lied. To make himself seem infallible. To protect some honorable reputation I wasn't aware he had. To make the world seem not as ugly as it really is, to make as many people as possible not see the truth, to see things in a distorted, warped way that not even he can possibly believe in. He lied because that's what he does. He lied because he can. He lied because he can't not lie. As one of the richest, most celebrated history and culture in America washed away forever, he lied.
I had somehow managed to not see any footage on the news or read any news links for days, so I had a lot of catching up to do on Friday. When I heard there was riots and looting I was horrified but not surprised. These are human beings afterall, and people will snap under pressure. And opportunists... well, there will always be opportunists.
What I had not known, however, was that "pressure" meant starvation and dehydration on top of the flooding and property loss. And "opportunists" meant, overwhelmingly, photograph after photograph of people trying to survive. I went through hundreds of photos. I saw perhaps 20 people with things they could sell off later. But mostly, I saw people stealing supplies. Food. Cereal. Soda. Beer. One woman had a bottle of bleach, no doubt to try and keep her mildewy clothes clean.
My eyes welled up. I fought back tears. Human beings-- Americans-- having to resort to "looting" so they don't starve. And our President looked into the eyes of our country and feigned ignorance. Our government that spent billions upon billions on a farcical notion of "Homeland Security", couldn't come up with a response to this horror despite years of warnings and days of knowing precisely what would happen in advance (I certainly feel secure about their reaction a nuclear missile being launched at us with an impact time of 7 minutes, don't you?). And our President couldn't come up with anything more than an obvious, transparent lie.
Ladies and gentlemen... the world has gone crazy.
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with love from CRS @ 8:51 PM
1 Comments:
I dont know if you saw this or not, but I beleive it was on yahoo. Basically they had pictures of several black people wading with supplies, and the caption referred to them as looters, then later there was a photo of white people with supplies and they were "lucky enough to have found them in an abandoned store" or something along those lines.
