The Hurricane
How do we wade through the reports coming from the gulf coast and make any kind of sense of what this storm has done to America? As always, adversity has brought out the worst and best aspects of human nature. The stark inhumanity of a brother shooting his sister in the head for fresh water stands in contrast to the images of neighbors helping neighbors.
We look from a distance at a city where 75% of the infrastructure has been destroyed. 500,000 people have been displaced, thousands are presumed dead. The dead haunt us from our TV screen: bodies tied to stop signs to keep them from floating away, bodies stacked up at the Superdome, bodies on park benches... The living haunt us more, doubled over from hunger on the rooftops as they wait for rescue, police and firefighters resigning in exhaustion and desperation... Thirst, hunger, deprivation, exhaustion playing through the faces as they wait for us to help.
We cling to images of the supply convoy rolling through water to bring too little relief after too long a wait. We cheer at the sight of the National Guard carrying babies from the hospital where they were stranded, and the news of one child returned to his parents.
This is America, long after the hurricane has vanished. Now we face the clean-up. It is easy to look at George W. Bush and blame him for waiting two days to leave his ranch, for staging photo ops and press conferences instead of closed-door meetings to find out what went wrong. I could rant for hours on the pathetic response the federal government managed in this crisis. I detest the phony relief events and the arrogance of a president who would could tour the devastation then go play golf. It is equally easy to point fingers at our Secretary of State for the callousness shown in attending Broadway shows and shopping in New York while thousands on the Gulf Coast perish. But the cretins in Washington are little more than a pimple on the butt of the real monster.
Yes, they appointed or hired the useless individuals that failed to have an evacuation plan. Political cronies lurk behind every failure of the relief effort. But, we need look no further than the mirror to find the monster responsible for this mess. We are to blame for not crying foul when public officials appoint cronies to office instead of looking for the best-qualified candidate for the job. We allowed this in our name. We did nothing to prevent it.
If we do not stand up and start insisting that public officials be accountable for what they do, if we continue to silently watch while the cretins rule... You know the answers and you know it runs through every community in the nation. Lexington let a water company buy the city council. Kentucky has a governor appointing cronies and thumbing his nose at the electorate. We might not be facing the hurricane yet, but the winds are rising and the crisis lurks on every street corner in America.
We look from a distance at a city where 75% of the infrastructure has been destroyed. 500,000 people have been displaced, thousands are presumed dead. The dead haunt us from our TV screen: bodies tied to stop signs to keep them from floating away, bodies stacked up at the Superdome, bodies on park benches... The living haunt us more, doubled over from hunger on the rooftops as they wait for rescue, police and firefighters resigning in exhaustion and desperation... Thirst, hunger, deprivation, exhaustion playing through the faces as they wait for us to help.
We cling to images of the supply convoy rolling through water to bring too little relief after too long a wait. We cheer at the sight of the National Guard carrying babies from the hospital where they were stranded, and the news of one child returned to his parents.
This is America, long after the hurricane has vanished. Now we face the clean-up. It is easy to look at George W. Bush and blame him for waiting two days to leave his ranch, for staging photo ops and press conferences instead of closed-door meetings to find out what went wrong. I could rant for hours on the pathetic response the federal government managed in this crisis. I detest the phony relief events and the arrogance of a president who would could tour the devastation then go play golf. It is equally easy to point fingers at our Secretary of State for the callousness shown in attending Broadway shows and shopping in New York while thousands on the Gulf Coast perish. But the cretins in Washington are little more than a pimple on the butt of the real monster.
Yes, they appointed or hired the useless individuals that failed to have an evacuation plan. Political cronies lurk behind every failure of the relief effort. But, we need look no further than the mirror to find the monster responsible for this mess. We are to blame for not crying foul when public officials appoint cronies to office instead of looking for the best-qualified candidate for the job. We allowed this in our name. We did nothing to prevent it.
If we do not stand up and start insisting that public officials be accountable for what they do, if we continue to silently watch while the cretins rule... You know the answers and you know it runs through every community in the nation. Lexington let a water company buy the city council. Kentucky has a governor appointing cronies and thumbing his nose at the electorate. We might not be facing the hurricane yet, but the winds are rising and the crisis lurks on every street corner in America.
posted by Gwen Mayo | 1:54 PM
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