warning: this is going to be an irrational freeform rant.
is it in the genetic makeup of the bush family to have an inability to respond to a natural disaster?
you’d think that, after his great leadership in the days immediately after 9/11, he’d have a clue. but the federal government response, and bush’s personal response, was pathetic from the start.
i think the thing that most upsets me is the government and the media, hand-in-hand, characterizing poor black people as “looters”. i’m sure there are some people stealing tv sets. i’d also guess that the vast majority of people are taking food and water and nothing else, but that makes for crappy tv so you don’t see much of that. i’m also betting that if these were mostly white people “stealing” food and water, they would be characterized as “people desperate to feed their families in an intolerable situation” rather than as criminals, thugs, and looters. and i’m sure that there are indeed plenty of white people taking stuff, but they aren’t on tv either.
here we have tens of thousands of people who had a total inability to evacuate. they had no cars or transportation, and no one thought in advance to provide any for them in the case of a catastrophic event. they lived in neighborhoods that local and federal governments knew damn well would flood, because they were “protected” by levees that they knew wouldn’t stand up to the strength of that storm. they were left to fend for themselves for days, and then afterwards were criminalized and stigmatized for doing what they had to do to survive.
are you telling me that, if you had no food or water, and you were in 100-degree-plus heat, you wouldn’t walk into a store and take something, knowing that you had no alternative and knowing that help wasn’t coming for you anytime soon? of course you would. and if you say you wouldn’t, you are full of shit.
people, when forced, will do what they have to do to survive. and the answer is not to “crack down on the looters” or demonize the victims. the answer is to use the wealth and power of the last remaining superpower on earth to get supplies immediately on the scene. now.
of course, planning for this would have entailed having some foresight, which evidently was never the case. all these years later, iraq still has less capability for electrical distribution than they did before the invasion. do you think these clowns can manage the current crisis? of course not. they have demonstrated no ability for logistics, organization, or planning of any kind.
and now their reaction is to try to stage-manage the situation to try to preserve what little political capital bush still has. it makes me sick to my fucking stomach to see him standing down there in mississippi, with his shirt-sleeves symbolically rolled up as per his handlers’ instructions, trying to commiserate with survivors of this mess that he had such a large part in creating. and, in the midst of that attempt to “connect with the people”, he’s still demonizing the “looters”.
you know what? if he wants to get a sense of how people are faring, send his sorry fucking ass into the superdome without a secret service escort.
kirk and i have donated to the red cross and so should you. but that ain’t enough. there are midterm elections coming up, and a message needs to be sent to those responsible.
i think people, on a visceral level, really get the point being inadvertently made by their government.