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desperation words by artemisia posted September 2, 2005 - 12:47pm
this started off as a rant, but i'm so overwhelmed i don't even have the capacity to rant. i've spent the last week doing nothing but following the hurricane and its aftermath. i know its not healthy for me to do so. in fact, i'm making myself ill by doing so. but how can i not follow it? how can anyone do anything else? talk about anything else? the images of the misery are overwhelming. but its the anecdotes that tear me apart and fill me with rage. anecdotes of grisly horror. corpses of babies, children, adults, and elderly being pushed away with sticks as rescuers searched for the living. corpses left on roadsides and sidewalks. left to be consumed by maggots and rats. anecdotes of misery. thirty thousand people trapped in a building without working toilets. the old, the very young, and the sick dying from thirst and hunger, from lack of medicine, from the heat and the stench. anecdotes of desperation. hospital staff who haven't slept in 48 hours ventillating the sick by hand because the generator has run out of diesel. and when anecdotes like these tear at my heart, leaving me too overwhelmed to even cry anymore, i am consumed with rage over the cruelty, stupidity, arrogance, indifference, and incompetence of those charged with preventing and responding to this disaster. yesterday, on one of the news channels, i saw a man saying that he and a small group of others had made their way to a bridge leading to a new orleans suburb, walking miles through muck and chest high water and sludge and heat and stink. when they got to the bridge, a national guardsman was there. he told them they couldn't leave. that they weren't allowed to just walk out of the city. they left anyway. luckily, that was yesterday. today they would be shot for doing so:
not only does she someone expect people trapped in new orleans without power or phone or even a sewer system to hear her so-called warning, but she is proudly declaring that the government is sending trigger-happy soldiers to kill people who have already lost family members and every possession they ever had. i boil with rage when i think how preventable this whole situation was, when i think about the looting of the government treasury to give tax breaks to the wealthy, to fund an illegal and ill conceived war, to create incompetent and wasteful new bureaucracies and to provide windfall wealth to a select few. how a media-bite managed "department of homeland security" with its color coding and duct tape advice failed to act to prevent a well documented and inevitable disaster. the levees didn't fail because of a failure of technology. half of holland is below sea level. they have hydraulic levees that they can raise and lower as needed. our levees failed because of political indifference to a largely poor, black urban populace. not that the indifference is new. its just the speed at which its killing people and destroying lives that's new. and yet, the only crime i seem to hear about is looting. while for the most part people are willing to concede, in their armchair philospher pose, that stealing food and water and diapers is not a crime, they still wish to judge those who took jewelry and electronics. never mind that society's indifference destroyed their lives and killed their families and friends. that whatever they can grab may be the only wealth they have to start a new life with. that for all we know they are trading these goods for food and water in a desperate improvised economy. we aren't there. we don't know. but there are those among us who are quick to judge those who, having lost everything, decide to take what they can get. and where is laura bush in all of this? isn't she our country's ambassador to inner city gangs, carrying her message of "just say no to guns"? every major city has its underbelly of gangs and junkies and thieves. for the most part, upper and middle class america doesn't care, as long as they stay in their own neighborhoods and prey on their own kind. instead of a real commitment to addressing the needs of urban youth, we have laura bush and her "just say no" campaign. but then, when a deluge pushes them out of their neighborhoods, and into the public eye, when their rage is magnified by starvation and thirst and death and despair, we are ready to shoot to kill. and they better get that message on those flooded big screen tvs they took that they have no electricity to power. and so i watch my overwhelming sadness evolve into rage. and i'm not even there. From War and Peace
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I, too, am beyond ranting, beyond any words that do justice to what I am seeing on the news and online. I can't bear to see any more, and can't bear to leave it alone. I am stunned that this is happening (not the aftermath - the response to it, the people left to die); and yet in another way I am not surprised because it fits in with all the signals that bush & co have been giving. I suppose I am amazed that they can be so blatent - but I think they have miscalculated, there is a tint of revolution in the air. (1)
 I am too outraged to even think. I want some heads on platters, NOW! (1)
Artemisia, you're most definitely not alone. I was just trying to email a friend and couldn't find the words for the fury and sickness that's overwhelmed me these past few days. I had a bit of good news tonight. A good friend had been frantically trying to reach her ex-husband in NO for several days -- she heard from him on Tuesday and knew he'd made it through the storm itself, but had had no word since then. This evening she got a call from his mother: turns out he and several friends managed to walk out of the city and eventually got a ride to Baton Rouge. He's okay and trying to get back to relatives in Pennsylvania. I've never even met this guy (they were divorced before I met my friend) and I wanted to cry with relief when I heard he was safe. I'm taking that to bed with me tonight because I just can't bear the misery and rage I've been sleeping with all week. The blood-stained monsters of this administration have several thousand (more) homicides on their heads today. What they are doing treads awfully close to democide. (1)
Through this whole thing I can't shake the feeling that his posse has cut him loose. I actually had this feeling before Katrina, but this travesty really brings it into sharp releif. They are done with him, and the man is barely smart enough to put on his own socks. (1)
It's like the guy fell off the side of the earth. He's sure not helping his boy with damage controll. (1)
A nation's infrastructure does not fail overnight. This has been coming for a long time and New Orleans happened to be the canary in the mine - not that around the nation's earthworks are about to collapse left and right. Rather, the programs of the New Deal and even a generation ago are showing age. Like a car that needs to have its oil changed, a tune-up, tires and breaks, the infrastructure of the United States needs tending. Private corporations have not been very good at this task. Ronald Reagan pitched the idea that government was the problem. Private industry was the solution. Downsize the government. Upsize industry. Then all would be well. The threat to American lay beyond its shores. In Afghanistan Al-Qaeda plotted yet another devastating attack. Iraq was making Weapons of Mass Destruction, WMD, that could level a city . . . like New Orleans. The rich, we were told, are over-taxed and needed "relief." Loath to impose a draft (and it's a time of war according to the commander-in-chief, so why not) National Guard units are making up for the short-fall. To pay for the foreign wars, we are told that money was shifted from pork-barrel projects like shoring up the earth works around New Orleans, to instead creating "shock and awe" in Baghdad. New freeways, like Boston's Big Dig, attract our attention. Mucking about in the bayou does not. Nor does putting money into public transportation or shoring up the nation's rail system as fuel prices trend ever upward. Reagan sold the American people a bill of goods. Starting with Nixon, a friend observed, administration after administration has either actively dismantled the government or let it lay fallow - except for agencies that carry guns and snoop on the people. These agencies are the centerpiece of the confederacy of Republicans - a confederacy of big business, vested interests, and religious fundamentalists. We can say Bush was to blame and he should go - and he will on his own at the end of his term, but the deeper problem is not the administration, but a populace that seems too worn out to care or too full of free-enterprise sloganeering. A nation's infrastructure is built by its government, not by for-profit corporations. Protecting the population against floods, or having adequate mass transit, or a rail system profit any group of cartels. So long as the American people continue to be enthralled by the evangels of laissez faire capitalists, we will not understand that what they are selling is not what we need. We need a nation that works and where the infrastructure is there to prevent disasters such as the aftermath of Katrina. This slide started long ago - in the late 1970's and early 1980's and we are reaping what we sowed, or better yet, what we failed to sow. We were pennywise and pound foolish and like the parable of the ant and the grasshopper, we fiddled instead of worked on our own house. Yes Bush is to blame, but he is not the only one. He is merely the head of a chain of administrations that have presided in turn as America has decayed in education, health care, and the very fiber that holds it together. (1)
 To focus on Bush's inept arrogance (or arrogant ineptitude) is to miss the real problem, the real issue we have to address: Conservatism. "Government is the problem," Reagan said. Now we can see how that's not quite true. It's not that government itself is the problem, it's that ineffective government is the problem, and on that score the conservatives are culpable through their relentless dismantling of public institutions. And the Democrats have gone along with it, unwilling to pass up the pork and junkets and pious posturing. (1)
 ive read something in the last few days that has me thinking. you can look back in time and sense the beginnings of the acceptance of social selfishness in statements such as reagan made when he asked if "are you better off than you were four years ago". the writer stated that the question should be "are we better off than we were four years ago". political hatred also became more publicly acceptable and empowered with the dawn of the "newt gingrich" political approach in the early 90s. rush limbaugh and his ilk now dot the commercial media landscape as a result preaching and teaching hatred and intolerance to others. they teach others that it's ok to hate. it's pretty evident to me today that our conservative republican representatives HATE US. so there's a cancer in america today, in many americans, a malignancy of hatred, greed and a lack of caring for anyone but oneself. its a hatred that wishes to destroy all the things the collective "we" (as opposed to the collective "me") built up in this country. they want to destroy it all, destroy all our social progress and loot our nation of its wealth in the process. i almost never watch television, other than movies, but this week i've been watching the news. the results of the politics of selfishness and hatred exemplified by this republican administration are out in the open for all to see now, in all its stinking, filthy, rotten glory. i cannot tell you how ashamed i am of the people who represent me at the federal level. i am deeply ashamed of them all. and we are NOT better off than we were four years ago. nor will we be until the malignancy is removed. (1)
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