it's by a duer, Carol, who may not be very active on DU, but is such an asset to St. Petersburg Florida for all she does for the people the soceity overlooks.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/hurricanecarol/5th September, 2005. 1:07 am. Rage
There isn't an activist I know who wouldn't be in New Orleans now if it wasn't for the system the binds them. A school teacher who has to be back in school Tuesday morning, a guy who after several months of unemployment is in his second week on the job at a sailing shop, and me, supporting a family and a husband on disability with my job which consists of caretaking a computer system for the "premier provider of vacation experiences" blah, blah, blah.
Right now, all three industries (including the school system) provide services that are non-essential in light of what is going on in New Orleans and the surrounding areas. But if the school teacher, the sail shop guy and I were to say, "You know what? I'm going to New Orleans this week...and maybe next week, too" we'd lose our jobs.
Oh I probably wouldn't lose it right away. I have eleven days of vacation saved up. I could legitimately take it, however we are in the middle of a "mission critical" project and I am a "key resource" and how MOTHERFUCKING STUPID IS THAT WHEN YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT A COMPANY THAT PROVIDES VACATION EXPERIENCES?" Why are we even open for business? Why aren't my company's "key resources" managing a supply relay? Why aren't they directing field kitchens? Why aren't they building shelters? Why aren't they baking bread?
At any rate, it would take my company about six months or so to figure out how to put me in a position that could be eliminated. And yet with each day, with each news story out of New Orleans, the urge to go gets worse. I see problems. I envision solutions. And I am stuck here while the bureacratic nightmare that never ends bypasses fetid shitholes with pockets of surviors in order to set up photo ops for apathetic, incompetant circle-jerking, ass-covering pussy-politicos who need to be summarily dumped in the heart of New Orleans with a big ass bucket and told to make themselves useful.
Here is a sentence from the latest yahoo news story, "But bodies were everywhere: floating in canals, slumped in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways and medians and hidden in attics." Think about it...slumped in wheelchairs. Well, how in the fuck might that have happened, hmmmmm? Were the poor bastards trying to wheel out of the city in the absence of a more viable evacuation plan? Or were they merely left to die afterwards while the p-Resident and the Department of Homeland Security sat around for a week trying to decide how in the hell this could have happened in the absence of a single Mohammed or Al-Queda sleeper cell to blame it on? Is the CIA still working on the Osama video...the one where he takes credit for the storm? Or is it too busy doctoring satellite photos of strange devices in the desert that may be either camels or ACME Weather Weapons?
And from the same story, "'The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home, and every day she called him and said, `Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, `And yeah, Momma, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday' — and she drowned Friday night. She drowned on Friday night," Broussard said. "Nobody's coming to get her, nobody's coming to get her. The secretary's promise, everybody's promise. They've had press conferences — I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sakes, shut up and send us somebody."
HOW THE FUCK IS THIS POSSIBLE? How many more survivors is the "Help-I-can't-find-my-ass-with-both-hands" Bush administration going to kill before this is all over? When will we have the first serious outbreak of disease? Because it's coming people. The only thing that remains to be seen is if the Bush spin machine will blame it Iran to divert everyone's attention from the fact that the outbreak is something common in Third World countries...something like malaria or dysentery or plague...and entirely preventable for a country that has some semblance of its shit together.
Yes and here's another priceless vignette, "Ten people are living at the Waffles Plus, where vehicles passed by for five days without stopping. On the sixth morning, a church group pulled in and handed them a box of food — the first they had received. Jimmy Dubreuil, 23, had tried earlier in the week to enter a Dollar Store several miles away but says he was chased out by a police officer who pistol-whipped him. A fresh gash on his close-cropped head has been stapled shut. 'They started telling us we're thieves," he says. "We're not thieves. We just wanted to feed the babies.'" and "Ahmed's guests are staying for free, sleeping on the concrete in front of their doors and squatting behind the buildings to relieve themselves."
This story is from St. Louis, Mississippi. Now while I did not know there was a St. Louis, Mississippi before, I know it now, I can find it on a map and I am willing to fucking bet that I could organize an entire food and clean-up relay run all along the I-10 corridor. Has it even occurred to anyone to take a shipment of fucking Port-o-lets? Kudos to the church group, though, for accomplishing something that the mighty, macho testosterone-laden Bush fuckers couldn't manage in a motherfucking week.
If every city, municipality, whistle-stop and suburb offered to adopt an evacuee, we'd have the entire problem solved. There have to be a hundreds of thousands of named cities in America. Fuck, there are probably a million home-owner's associations alone. Maybe if they used some of their operating budget to put a family in one of their empty houses and find them a job instead of using it for enforcement of lawn ornament regulations, the crisis would be solved. How many fuckers are there in Congress? Add that to the number of fuckers in state and local legislatures. Now multiply that by the number of spare bedrooms these fuckers have. You could save that many people right off the bat.
I am enraged...and all the more so because I feel helpless. Because the wheels of bureaucracy move too slowly. Because it is not apparent that they are spinning in any materially useful way. Because there is a family on I-10 in the richest country on the planet who had a home a week ago and are now starving to death and squatting behind an old motel. Because there are corpses in wheelchairs in the streets of New Orleans. Because I will get in my car to go to work on Tuesday and have to try to pretend that I give two shits about whether our company has a mint on every pillow and tastefully appointed accomodations for every guest.
The highway to work has a fork in it - one road leads to the cube farm and the other leads to the Waffles Plus. I am getting way too old to be making these decisions.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(779 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
