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If anyone cares, I'd appreciate feedback :hi:
In a matter of days, on live television, Hurricane Katrina showed a simple, but often ignored reality: that the “have-nots” of this society are so cruelly in poverty and without a voice that the American Government nonchalantly abandoned them in a time of absolute crisis; simply because they were poor, and mostly black.
Why is the catastrophe affecting a specific group so narrowly? Part of the answer lies in the socio-economic structure of New Orleans. Those living in New Orleans under the poverty level, according the US Census Bureau, are about 27%. Of those in poverty, 85% of them are black. When a major evacuation is called for, as it does occasionally in Florida and other hurricane battered states, there will be always be foolish individuals who chose to stay and ride out the storm. But those in New Orleans had no choice: they had no cars, no public transportation, no money- they were literally left behind. When news to evacuate the city came, they didn’t choose to stay; they were trapped.
There was also an interesting, dangerous variable in this disaster: the fact that the city itself is below sea level and was kept dry by a system of dams and levees. The Army Corp. of Engineers noted in 2001 that if the system was breeched during a powerful storm or hurricane, the city could be flooded. Nothing was done after this report. And when this did happen- live on TV- and the government still did not respond, the people of New Orleans began to drown in their own homes, after being told to wait for help that never came.
In the days after the storm, curious and disquieting things began to happen. The expected looting that followed was only called “looting” by the media when blacks were taking supplies- whites were merely “finding” items. FEMA began turning away aid and cutting emergency communication lines for local authorities. Literally, thousands of gallons of clean water that was donated by Wal-Mart were turned away from the desperate victims. Doctors who came from distant states, and even foreign countries, were told to leave the area. Bush ate cake at a Senator’s birthday party and played the guitar with a country music star. Condoleezza Rice shopped for thousand dollar shoes on Fifth Avenue.
And all the while, the people of New Orleans drowned.
When help finally, long and fatally overdue, it was condescending, sneering. When Barbara Bush was touring the refugees in the Astrodome in Texas that was generously allowed to be used as a camp, she chuckled: “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this is working very well for them.”
When seen from a wide angle, the “response” that was mounted to Katrina becomes wholly lax and disturbingly callous. The government knew what would happen if the levee and dam system was breeched, the administration saw on live TV the squalor and desolate conditions of a flooded city, they saw all of this and still they chose not to respond to it with the necessary and available might to help the American people. There were more important things to be done, apparently, then help our own citizens from the worst disaster to hit our shores. The images on TV were images that should not have been allowed to occur on the richest nation in all the world.
My expectations, I believe, are not too high or unrealistic. All I ask is that those in power do everything in their earthly power to help as many people as possible as fast as possible; this is something that is not bound to political ideology or beliefs. And yet, when it came to aiding the poor victims of Katrina, the leaders of this country made a willing choice to ignore the situation. Bush ate cake. Rice shopped for shoes. FEMA turned help away.
Our own citizens were allowed to die; neglected, and abandoned by our leaders.
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