The Washington Post tells me this morning, “Armored military vehicles and national guard troops started moving into New Orleans Thursday morning amid continuing reports of violence and chaos in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.”
Of COURSE there’s violence and chaos. These people were left to die, and now are even more clearly being left to die. They don’t need armored vehicles bringing bullets to shoot at them. They need trucks, boats and planes bringing water, food, and rescue.
And they know very well that this government – their government – will spend BILLIONS and will mobilize with extreme rapidity on behalf of whatever it really wants to do. It just doesn’t look like dying poor people in America’s cities happen to be on their government’s list of things to care about. We know the money is there. We know the busses, planes, trucks and personnel are there. But they are not available when it’s a matter of life and death. They are not being moved until it is way too late, and way too little. Where are the morals? Where are the values?
God may move slowly, but God is nobody’s fool. Be careful, America. Speak up, America.
Visits: 120
Amen – it’s ridiculous. To hear the Bush-owned media tell it, it’s as if those in the Convention Center took a vote: “OK, somebody go out and shoot when you hear the ‘copters…” So there are some violent drug fiends on the street. For this, the rest of the community should do penitance? “OK, boys, we been bad, ‘couple more days, then…”
Rubbish. This is the CIA talking, to focus on the violence against rescuers. This is backtalk, and a source of alibis. Or do we hear the soldiers telling us all Iraqis are trash because of some suicide bombers? No, so many soldiers speak with respect of those people. Likewise the poor people of New Orleans deserve respect despite the outrages of a few.
You say, “These people are animals.” Do you blush when you say that? Do you worry about standing very alone before God someday?
There are LOTS of “animals” loose in this country, and I promise you, the really dangerous ones are neither poor nor black.
Put you or I in their feces-soaked shoes, and I bet we’d be getting very crazy too. Come on, life for those people is like living on the set of the “Night of the Living Dead.” People go crazy watching corpses float by. Some are on drugs. Do a few incidences of insanity impugn the probable 90% of the community who have done no wrong? Why focus on the insane acts? Why are these things getting SO MUCH media attention, at the expense of seeing what suffering is going on?
The federal government IS moving to help these people. Granted, they are moving slowly. Far too slowly. And I agree that “President” Bush could do more to get the ball rolling. But there is no excuse for these people to fire on the the people who have traveled many miles to help them. Yes, they’re frustrated, yes they are at the end of their rope. But where is the justification behind all the violence? where is the justification for the murders and rapes and wanton theft that has taken place? there is no justification for it. These people are animals. They’re lucky to get any help at all as long as they keep behaving the way they are.
In my much reading and investigation about the Bush regime in a post-Patriot Act world, I stand convinced that we are living under a dictatorship. In fact all information now flows through the executive office.
Knowing this, the blame for leaving huge populations to starve and die for many days after a hurricane lies squarely on the dictator. This isn’t some accidental oversight. It is a long awaited set-up for the African American poor.
Nothing has changed racial prejudice in the south. If anything, some old hatred may be more entrenched. Some want to get even for the civil rights movement. I would not expect the Bush family to err towards compassion on civil rights issues. The post-hurricane neglect of rescue efforts may well be animated by racial hatred.
What I feared, when I heard Bush say “a lot of help is on the way,� is that he meant guns. Why not provoke people to riot, letting starving citizens to impugn themselves by stealing food and water? Remember, this is Mister Capital Punishment. Bush now has his excuses to do what he loves best, for he has called himself a “war president.� He can make war on his own people, criminalizing the poor.
Now the regime can try out all those Civilian Inmate Labor Facilities the administration has been building at the ends of runways of major airports – huge prison facilities which observers report are still unoccupied. Now the dictator can wreak hateful laws on the dispossessed, as the poor of New Orleans and Mississippi have become. Although they need new tennis shoes after a week of newfound homelessness, wading through human filth, I don’t hear much understanding going out towards them.
What, you might say, Bush would want to provoke riots, to go in and gun people down? I believe that our government is sick enough to set people up like that.
The one thing I can say worked well here: I have been praying for the US church, that people might wake up and see what is happening in government. At least the African American element of the church will no longer be fooled, if any ever were.