blogging it real

Hurricane Katrina couldn’t have picked a worse part of the United States to ruin. New Orleans, a place where the poorest of the poor live. A place known for throwing a good party, and a place that until this day, maintained the Cajun tradition of crying when someone is born and celebrating when they die. A hurricane, combined with failing infrastructure, poor cohesion, dismal emergency preparedness networks, and an incompetent federal state is giving New Orleans its greatest reason to weep yet. Bodies are floating in the streets. There is no potable water. There is no food. The hospitals have few drugs and now armed gangs are robbing them blind. The sick are dying at an amazing rate. The coroner’s have set up mobile morgues, and preserving bodies is a challenge.

Security is gone in New Orleans. Homeland security is scratching their nuts trying to figure out a plan to return the ruined city to a civil state, but all this department has experience in is making up bullshit airport rules about using plastic cutlery and not using the bathroom thirty minutes into or out of Washington D.C. No idea how to handle a situation like this; no idea of the needs and realities of their own nation. They are failing to do anything at all in this time of crisis.
George Bush keeps Americans safe by stuffing Guantanamo Bay full of supposed terrorists, and beating the shit out of Iraq, which had the nuclear capability of a microwave oven. This does wonders for playing into nationalism and false mind set of the needs of the nation-state. When it comes down to really protecting Americans, i.e. keeping the poorest of the nation from getting killed by the weather, he shits his pants.

A little too critical on the Texas golden boy? He’s the president, not a weather maker you say? Well, consider the deliberate restructuring and organizing of federal money towards foreign conquest wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that depleted any and all resources for real national emergencies. 10 billion for Louisiana? 88 billion for Iraq. In the fight against phoney threats, the phantoms get it all.

The worst story in this whole tale is that of the Louisiana national guard. A branch of the military specifically trained to cope with natural disasters, offer medical services, keep public order, and fix the problems of the national front when need, has most of its members fighting and dying in Iraq - a job that they should, under the U.S. constitution have never been sent to. When BBC interviewed persons in the Louisiana national guard whom are in Iraq, some replied as saying that they would not return home to help, because their priority still rests with protecting America from terrorism. That’s it. You’re house is gone, your family starving, your neighbor and the poor guy down the road are dead, and you’re chasing a six foot Saudi on dialyses around the desert. The real crisis breaks, and the national imagination triumphs. A classic example of the fox who has been trained to swim, and yet he thinks he’s supposed to live in the lake.

Hurricane Katrina has killed more than the Taliban could ever have dreamed of. It would take hundreds of suicide bombers going bump in the night to repeat the carnage, lawlessness, and utter human suffering that this bit of weather created. And yet, the U.S. government, its army and allies are afraid to rebuild New Orleans. They were unwilling to invest in human and infastructural resources from the beginning, ones that could have helped to cope for this scenario, and now, I reckon that most people would rather take their chances in Falujah over Bourbon Street. With the police running out of gasoline, and the red cross getting shot at, all is lost in New Orleans.

When the U.S. awakened from the aftermath of this storm, a challenge arose to rebuild and heal. But the greater challenge still lingers: awakening from the national amnesia of "national security as the war on terror" to really ask why the nation’s poorest are floating in the sea, why no one bothered to see this coming, and why no one is really willing to selflessly help out, without selfish regard for personal safety, as they do in droves in the Persian desert.