I was born in New York. 9/11 is still the only day I have ever just not gone to work -- called in sick, sure, but I just couldn't move from my television, watching my beloved city scream in agony as a monster stabbed a poisoned blade through its heart.
This is worse.
The unimaginable, breathtaking corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration throughout all this has made me purely ill, but right now even their responsibility for FEMA's sorry state pales to near-insignificance in the face of the massive death, destruction and suffering in the city. Babies dying of dehydration. Bodies floating in the streets. Thousands of people trapped, stranded, with no food or water because no one can get their heads out of their butts long enough to help them.
Politically, this is the right response:
No whitewashes. Find out who fucked up. Republicans, Democrats, I don't care. Anyone who screwed up should be tarred and feathered.Yes. Absolutely. We need to find out what went wrong and make sure it never happens again.
LATER.
(Though yes, there is a place for keeping the heat on the blood-sucking monsters who drained the defenses from the Big Easy to play God and pork with.)
Right now, however, anyone who can do something needs to do it. I don't care whether you're red, blue, purple or rutting chartreuse. Right now, you help and you're on the side of the angels as far as I'm concerned. The rest of us need to give whatever we can. While we're in sufficiently dire straits monetarily that we can't match the full Skippy challenge, we are donating what we can through my office, which has a matching fund. Best Buy has one as well, but given the rapidly increasing outpouring of donations, I suspect they'll hit their million dollar cap soon, whereas my office has not listed a donation cap of their own.
I'd ask everyone reading this to do what they can, but I'm certain that all of you already are.
That's what's really tearing me up, ironically enough. Emotionally, I don't know which way to jump. There is so much that is wrong and ugly about this horror. The government knew this disaster was coming. We knew. And the sheer callousness of so many...yeah, I expected a few epic cases of jerkus maximus, but the pure, unadulterated bile aimed at people too poor to get out and who had to salvage what they could to survive...there are no words. I won't call it stealing or looting when the city is all but destroyed, and what was taken was solely for survival; call it "salvage rights" and be done with it, considering that most of what was taken out of need would have been destroyed anyway. But some people have to blame anyone and everyone but their Dear Leaders, even if that means pointing the finger at dying infants and senile grandparents.
On the other hand...so much giving. So much caring. So much not caring who's in need, or how much, just seeing the need and filling it. It's a feeling I thought we lost when Mr. Uniter took a sword to this country and cleaved it in two. And maybe...just maybe...people are actually waking up to how badly our system is messed up. It's horrific that we had to lose an entire major American city for this to happen...and that even then, it might not be enough. But when Fox correspondents tell Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity to get a gorram clue, maybe there's hope after all. "The best of times, the worst of times" indeed.
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(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix
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