A year after triumphantly declaring that work in the Gulf Coast region would be “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen,” after promising that “Americans will look back at the response to Hurricane Katrina and say that our country grew not only in prosperity, but also in character and justice,” George Bush had the audacity to return to New Orleans. Unbelievable.
The US president wore the same blue photo-op shirt of a year ago, with sleeves rolled up to show he meant business. With his trademark nod and wink, he said he accepted full responsibility for the government’s breakdown in responding to the devastation — a breakdown that cost many additional lives. After adding that he’d learned his lesson, Bush then launched into his incoherent, all-too-familiar babble that help is on the way.
As I listened to Bush articulate (sic) his “vision” of a “bright dawn” emerging over New Orleans — watched him peer off in the distance at the brigades of Saints that only he could see “marching home,” I wondered if he gave any thought to the bodies of the lost still lying trapped in the debris so close to where he was standing. I wondered if the desperate families who remain broken and scattered throughout the country could see his lofty vision through their tears as they received notices from FEMA that their housing benefits are terminated, their utilities assistance cut off, their insurance claims denied.
In the last five years, George Bush and the greedy corporate mobsters who surround him have taught people throughout the world a lot about prosperity, character, justice — and about racism. Those innocents who have a right to expect justice in their lives and character in their leaders hit free-market’s blind-eyed and cold-shouldered wall in New Orleans. Too late, too many learned that, in Bush’s world, prosperity is for those who can afford it. In Bush’s world there is no safe haven for the poverty-stricken or the dispossessed if they are black — especially if they are black.
When Bush speaks, I never know if I’m laughing or crying. I keep hearing strange hyena-like barks of laughter, yet tears stream down my cheeks. Bush is big on role-playing wherever he goes, and — disregarding the anguished cries of American citizens still pleading for help — he said his role in New Orleans is “to encourage entrepreneurship.” He’s excited about his Go Zone legislation, which will give corporations and small businesses tax incentives to invest in the area. Bush said, “the people of this region are looking to corporate America to see if they’re here for the long haul...New Orleans is going to rise again,” he told business leaders, “and by planting your corporate flag here now and contributing to this city’s rebirth, you’ll gain some loyal customers when times get better...” Yep. Plant them corporate flags, boys, ‘cause the south’s gonna rise again. In all its racist glory.
Strange that the general consensus seems to be FEMA stumbled and fell into the pit of its own incompetence. I hate to be a party pooper, but there’s no way any government agency could be so woefully inept on every front. When you consider that martial law was declared immediately; that police, military, and armed contractor troops were immediately on site — not to retrieve bodies floating in the water nor to bury those who lay dead in the streets, but to keep the hungry and thirsty victims from stealing food and water — when you consider that from 8,000 to 10,000 residents of the St. Bernard Housing Project were immediately locked out of their homes, and FEMA immediately built a formidable iron fence around the project and padlocked it so they could not return; that all national, even worldwide, efforts to help were seamlessly blocked — it’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that FEMA’s response was immediate, and thorough as well.
The glee with which pundits, media propagandists and politicians pounced on the opportunity offered by the Katrina disaster to rid the city of its poverty population, especially those who owned homes on valuable real estate, is sickening. Baton Rouge Republican Rep. Richard Baker chortled to lobbyists about the more than 1,700 people killed and hundreds of thousands of others displaced, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
House Speaker Dennis Hastert agreed.
Is there hope for American citizens like those in New Orleans whose lives have been, continue to be, destroyed by cruel indifference? Yes, of course, but it will take citizens like you and me to stand up for what we know is right, to repair our shredded Constitution, and breathe new life into our comatose Bill of Rights. It is up to us. We must check the voting records of every single Congressperson and of every single senator — Republican and Democrat. Those who violated their oath to protect the US Constitution from enemies within must be shown no mercy. They are devoid of character and of virtue. In concert with the man in the blue photo-op shirt with the sleeves rolled up, they maliciously turn the other way while sending American citizens to their deaths. They are disloyal — treasonous. Together, they have disgraced this great nation. They must go.
Only then will the wounds inflicted from New York to New Orleans to Iraq begin to heal.
— Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. Contact her at: [email protected].
