Cable News PTSD

[Memekiller]

Cable News PTSD

I was one of the volunteers who helped greet the busloads of evacuees at the Astrodome. I had seen the images of these people on TV, screaming and angry, and we were told that they would be "frustrated" from the long ride, so we were prepared for the worst.

I volunteered to help out the nurses during triage. The general rule was, if someone was going to die in 24 hours, you put them on an ambulance, if they could hold out a couple of weeks, you sent them to the clinic, otherwise they were put back on the bus. We only called the ambulance twice, but the emergency rooms were so full the paramedics refused to take one of them because they only had a "small" heart attack. Most of the people had infections and swollen feet from standing in water for days. There were diabetics who hadn't had their insulin shots, people who were in bad need of their next dialysis.



Everything was ugly and beautiful at the same time. I count the experience, as horrible as it was, as one of the high points of my life. The only indication that the experience might have been in any way traumatic came later, in watching the news accounts, the way certain segments of our population have been painting these people I had seen.

When someone would suggest that these people stayed behind by choice, that they were in some way deserving of what they had undergone, my hear pounds. I have not cried since I was ten, but my eyes start to tear. I have been frustrated by the news before, but this was something different, a kind of rage and frustration that can’t be contained.

When my Republican friends explain that they wouldn't give money to "looters", or I read about the towns in Louisiana who turned the evacuees away because they didn't want to be the victim of riots, I can feel nothing but spite for how sensationalist news can lead to such misery. Why didn’t they walk? CNN asked. Yes, why didn’t these people walk to flee a storm moving faster than the speed limit, with an eye two marathons wide so that they could face a hundred-and-fifty mile winds on the open road?



The ugly and the beautiful. The beautiful came unwashed and packed on stolen buses. The ugly wears suits in front of TV cameras as they spread interested parties’ viciousness in exchange for access. They lounge by the pool of their River Oaks mansions, sealing government contracts to rebuild New Orleans as they worry about protecting their neighborhood’s white tint.

I no longer know if I’m an optimist or a pessimist. I come away from this whole experience knowing only one thing for sure: this nation is rotting from the head. Our nation is suffering because of the incompetence of elected officials, our millionaire talking heads and clueless military planners.

Our nation’s hope lies at the bottom, with our National Guardsmen, our volunteers, and disaster relief teams tasked with cleaning up the consequences of the elite’s greed and negligence. It lies with the people who, God willing, still don’t have access to TVs, and have not yet realized the humanity they experienced is not shared by all.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/9/6/131152/4952

[rocktivity]

1. Sounds like Bush will hold on to his base

When my Republican friends explain that they wouldn't give money to "looters", or I read about the towns in Louisiana who turned the evacuees away because they didn't want to be the victim of riots, I can feel nothing but spite for how sensationalist news can lead to such misery.

But the reporting about looters, armed gangs, rapists, and rioters was not rooted in a lust for sensationalism, or even as a weapon of mass distraction from how poorly Bush was doing. The purpose of portraying the victims as lawless neanderthals was to make them look less than worthy of humanitarian treatment--which of course makes his hardcore supporters happy. So what if the food and relocation services didn't arrive intime--they don't really deserve it, anyway.

:headbang:
rocknation

[Memekiller]

2. I agree...

That point was raised in the diary here:

"Always these stories have a specific purpose: to shut down empathy so that we won't demand action or accountability. They are told because we are a charitable nation, and if these people aren't rapists and murders and looters, then what they are is suffering, and suffering would demand attention that wasn't given. The fact that it wasn't given would demand that someone be taken to task."

It's about making these people seem like victims of circumstance entirely within their control so that we aren't bothered by watching them die.

[phantom power]

3. And it's working like a champ. At least with his base.