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words cannot describe
Sep. 2nd, 2005 01:30 pmI am so fucking pissed off about this. "Chose not to leave"? The average per capita income for New Orleans' 60%+ black population is less than $12,000 a year. It's a little hard to evacuate when you don't own a car and the government provides no assistance. And there's also the little fact that the entire city had run out of gasoline by Sunday. It doesn't at all surprise me that a guy this stupid is the head of a government agency, but he really needs to get his head out of his ass.
I hate it when people play the race card, but I completely agree that if the people who were forced to remain in New Orleans were not poor and black, the government, press, and rescue agencies would have started paying attention to the seriousness of the situation much earlier.
And now that I've gotten started, I might as well go ahead and say everything else that I've been thinking about this.
I'm particularly frustrated about this situation for two reasons: First of all, it should have been prevented. It doesn't take a genius to look at the geography of New Orleans and see that it's begging to get ravaged by floods. But the engineers who had been trying to draw attention to the problem for the past 40 years were practically ignored. Even though levees were sinking at the rate of four feet a year, funding to fix them was drastically cut. The government claimed they didn't have the money. Which brings me to the second reason: Now, I'm not about to say, as some idiots have, that Katrina was God's wrath on New Orleans. I don't believe that for a second. But it's true that the economy of the Louisiana and Mississipi gulf coasts was built primarily upon decadence. Oil, gambling, and partying. Such an economy always creates a very small class of extremely wealthy people, and an enormous class of people living near or in poverty. New Orleans wore a glamorous painted mask, but it was a very poor city. But the rest of the country never saw that because all it cared about was Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras. The poor population was invisible. If Beverly Hills was sinking at the rate of four feet a year, do you think the California government would ignore it? If a category five hurricane was headed for Manhattan, would newspapers ignore the problem until people were dying in the streets? But when it's a place that you only go to party once or twice a year, and you never have to aknowledge the people living in poverty who are breaking their backs so you can get drunk and have a good time, it's easy to brush off the problem as no big deal. It's easy to be blind to the fact that as the rich get richer, the city that they feed off of can't even afford to protect itself from certain devestation. And now it's the poorest of the people living there, the ones who didn't perpetuate or gain from this culture of decadence, the ones who couldn't leave even if they wanted to, who are losing their lives while the wealthy are sitting in posh hotels e-mailing their insurance companies. And one of the most historically and culturally important cities in America may disappear forever because for generations now, it has been seen as, and treated with no more respect than, a giant brothel. It's not God's actions that caused this mess, but our own greed and ignorance.
My heart really goes out to Ray Nagin and the frustration he's feeling right now at just getting the federal government to acknowledge that yes these poor people do exist and they are dying and we need to get off our asses and help them and a handful of buses and three navy ships are not enough. Even though I've never put any faith in Bush, I'm just amazed at how he's fucked this one up. He's fine with forcing young men to go to Iraq against their will, but when a major US city is wiped off the map, he couldn't even get off his ass to come back from vacation until the death toll was in the hundreds. I feel like he's abandoned this country.
I hate it when people play the race card, but I completely agree that if the people who were forced to remain in New Orleans were not poor and black, the government, press, and rescue agencies would have started paying attention to the seriousness of the situation much earlier.
And now that I've gotten started, I might as well go ahead and say everything else that I've been thinking about this.
I'm particularly frustrated about this situation for two reasons: First of all, it should have been prevented. It doesn't take a genius to look at the geography of New Orleans and see that it's begging to get ravaged by floods. But the engineers who had been trying to draw attention to the problem for the past 40 years were practically ignored. Even though levees were sinking at the rate of four feet a year, funding to fix them was drastically cut. The government claimed they didn't have the money. Which brings me to the second reason: Now, I'm not about to say, as some idiots have, that Katrina was God's wrath on New Orleans. I don't believe that for a second. But it's true that the economy of the Louisiana and Mississipi gulf coasts was built primarily upon decadence. Oil, gambling, and partying. Such an economy always creates a very small class of extremely wealthy people, and an enormous class of people living near or in poverty. New Orleans wore a glamorous painted mask, but it was a very poor city. But the rest of the country never saw that because all it cared about was Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras. The poor population was invisible. If Beverly Hills was sinking at the rate of four feet a year, do you think the California government would ignore it? If a category five hurricane was headed for Manhattan, would newspapers ignore the problem until people were dying in the streets? But when it's a place that you only go to party once or twice a year, and you never have to aknowledge the people living in poverty who are breaking their backs so you can get drunk and have a good time, it's easy to brush off the problem as no big deal. It's easy to be blind to the fact that as the rich get richer, the city that they feed off of can't even afford to protect itself from certain devestation. And now it's the poorest of the people living there, the ones who didn't perpetuate or gain from this culture of decadence, the ones who couldn't leave even if they wanted to, who are losing their lives while the wealthy are sitting in posh hotels e-mailing their insurance companies. And one of the most historically and culturally important cities in America may disappear forever because for generations now, it has been seen as, and treated with no more respect than, a giant brothel. It's not God's actions that caused this mess, but our own greed and ignorance.
My heart really goes out to Ray Nagin and the frustration he's feeling right now at just getting the federal government to acknowledge that yes these poor people do exist and they are dying and we need to get off our asses and help them and a handful of buses and three navy ships are not enough. Even though I've never put any faith in Bush, I'm just amazed at how he's fucked this one up. He's fine with forcing young men to go to Iraq against their will, but when a major US city is wiped off the map, he couldn't even get off his ass to come back from vacation until the death toll was in the hundreds. I feel like he's abandoned this country.
