Bangladesh? No, New Orleans

An AP Essay: Can this actually be happening in America?
9/2/2005,
By JIM LITKE
The Associated Press


(AP) — Image after image of unrelenting sorrow, layered one atop the other like a deck of haunting cards.

A baby held aloft, inches above a sea of desperate faces, gasping for air. The dead left where they've fallen, in plain view, robbed of even the simple dignity of a shroud. Survivors waiting, then begging, then fighting, finally, over food and water.

Here.

While the images of natural disasters and man-made ones alike, from Sri Lanka or Baghdad, cause despair, the pictures from New Orleans inspire not just helplessness, but disbelief. The richest, most powerful nation in the world can build schools, hospitals and shelters halfway around the globe, but it can't provide the basic necessities for its own days after a disaster that everybody saw coming?

Here?

Usually, we shudder, change the channel or turn the page, awaiting better news. But there is something too compelling about these pictures. The distance between us and the people in them has been narrowed, rendered uncomfortably close, and not just for those who are family, friends or neighbors. We recognize them. We all see people like them.

Here.

Authorities can't make the waters that did that retreat. They can't begin to rebuild the levee or the homes and businesses made uninhabitable, at least not now. They will never be able to restore much of what was washed away in the flood.

But if a reporter can interview a man standing outside a looted drugstore, and record his reluctance at having to go inside and steal pads for incontinence, why couldn't someone get medical supplies to the people huddled at the Superdome or the convention center in time, or the buses promised to evacuate them?

There are more questions than answers, and will be for years to come. That's the nature of disaster, and its aftermath. They expose our fragility, overwhelm our best intentions, mock our attempts to impose the sense of calm and order that prevails when life proceeds according to some rough plan.

Yet, ultimately, that's what is most unsettling about the constant stream of images: The suffering goes on not just for hours, but for days after we should have and could have ended it. And for all the commissions, reports and bravado that passes for preparedness, we didn't. It was a hand we never expected to be dealt.

Here.

There will be time enough, too, to assess blame, for politicians to point fingers, find and fire those deemed accountable. And maybe even to figure out how a handful of Southeast Asian governments, whose economies, armies and emergency resources could all be folded comfortably several times inside those of the United States, responded to a tsunami much larger and fiercer than Hurricane Katrina with swiftness and efficiency, and we could not. And so the frustration builds, not so much over what happened, but what did not.

Here.

In the meantime, the disturbing images keep rolling in, interrupted now and then by more hopeful ones. The trucks, jeeps, buses and helicopters so scarce the past few days are out moving in force. Police and National Guardsmen are on the streets, rescue workers are getting in place. The babies in the latest pictures are contentedly emptying bottles, pallets filled with water and food are being unloaded by human chains. One administration official after another turns up on the screen to offer reassurances and soothing words.

But the damage has been done, and it's no longer limited to the lives lost and ruined, or the property destroyed. Those are things, sadly enough, that can be totaled up over time.

Much harder to measure is the cost of all those searing images burned into the national conscience, and what they've done to the sense of security that was our last refuge when disasters wreaked havoc, and then, unnecessary suffering, in distant lands — the certainty that it couldn't happen here.

Now we know better.

[Modificato da Corcaigh 03/09/2005 11.46]

ciao Corcaigh, ho iniziato a frequentare questo forum da qualche giorno avendo in progetto di trasferirmi a cork in un prossimo futuro, ho trovato un sacco di informazioni utili (grazie)e vedo con piacere (se si può parlare di piacere a queste notizie)che si possono affrontare temi anche non strettamente legati all'Irlanda.

Che dire, più di un terzo della guardia nazionale è impegnato in Iraq, Bush si è affrettato a farsi vedere affranto sui luoghi della tragedia ma forse era meglio se ci pensava prima.
Le immagini dei disperati che hanno perso quel poco che avevano hanno fatto il giro del mondo, si disperati perchè chi ne aveva le possibilità si è messo in salvo prima, la domanda che viene quasi subito spontaneo porsi è ma se al posto di una catastrofe naturale preannunciata fosse stato un attacco terroristico con armi di distruzione di massa? Dov'è la grande macchina dei soccorsi che dovrebbe essere stata messa in piedi dopo l'11 settembre? o forse le minoranze non sono degne di attenzione?

Receding floodwaters expose the dark side of America - but will anything change?
Jonathan Freedland sees a country waking up to injustice and high-level incompetence

Monday September 5, 2005
The Guardian
The waters flow in and the waters flow out, washing away all that once lay on the surface -and revealing what lies beneath. So it is with all floods in all places, but now it is America which stands exposed. And neither America nor the world much likes what it sees.
The first revelation was not spoken in words, but written in the faces of those left behind. Television viewers from Bradford to Bangalore could not help but notice it, and Americans from Buffalo to Bakersfield could not deny it. The women pleading for their lives in handwritten signs, the children clinging to tree branches, the prisoners herded on to a jail roof - they were overwhelmingly black.

This will not be news to most Americans. They know that a racial divide still haunts their country, as it has from its very founding. Like a character in Shakespearean tragedy, race is America's fatal flaw, the weakness which so often brings it low.
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, could see the danger. "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," he wrote in 1785, reflecting on the crime that was slavery. "His justice cannot sleep forever."

Time and time again, America has been forced to wake up to the racial injustice which has been its historic curse. It was the source of a civil war in the 19th century and of repeated battles through the 20th. From the desegregation and civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s to the Los Angeles riots and even the OJ Simpson trial of the 1990s, America has undergone periodic reminders that it is in the relationship between black and white that it has failed to honour its own, animating ideals.

Katrina has rammed home that message once more, with lacerating force. White Americans, who regarded New Orleans as a kind of playground, a place to enjoy the carnal pleasures of music, food, drink and more, have learned things about that city - and therefore their society - that they would probably have preferred not to know. They have discovered that it was mainly white folks who lived on the higher, safer ground, while poorer, black families had to huddle in the cheaper, low-lying housing - that race, in other words, determined who got hit.

They have also learned that 35% of black households in the area did not have a car. Or that the staff and guests of the Hyatt hotel were evacuated first, while the rest, the mainly poor and black, were at the back of the queue. Or that 28% of the people of New Orleans live in poverty and that 84% of those are black. Or that some people in that city were so poor, they did not have the money even to catch a bus out of town - that race, in other words, determined who got left behind.

Most Americans want to believe that kind of inequality belongs in the past, in the school textbooks. But Katrina has shaken them from that delusion.

They have had to face another painful truth. Their government has proved itself incompetent. Yes, it could act quickly once it had decided to act - but it idled for days. This disastrous performance will surely saddle the remainder of George Bush's presidency, just as the botched Desert One rescue of American hostages from the besieged US embassy in Tehran hobbled that of Jimmy Carter. Americans expect competence from their leader as a minimum requirement. And if an image of a crashed helicopter in the Iranian desert could undo one president, surely pictures of an American city reduced to a Somali or Bangladeshi kind of chaos spell disaster for this one.

But the shock may well do more than shift perceptions of the current administration. For 25 years, the dominant US ideology has been to shrink the state. "Government is not the solution to our problem," declared Ronald Reagan. "Government is the problem."

That defined the limits for state activism thereafter. After decades of energetic government programmes, from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s, the state was compelled to retreat. Taxes would go down and the government would do less.

Mr Bush personifies that ideology with more vigour than anyone since Reagan. Yet now, after Katrina, the national mood might alter. Americans have seen where small government leads. The authorities in Louisiana, including the military, pleaded long ago with Washington to reinforce the levees that were designed to save New Orleans from a great flood. The Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105m (£57m): the White House gave them $40m.

It is conceivable that Americans will now call a halt to their quarter-century experiment in limited government - and the neglected infrastructure that has entailed. There are some tasks, they may conclude, which neither individuals nor private companies can do alone - and evacuating tens of thousands of people from a drowning city is one of them.

Yesterday the New York Times' resident conservative columnist David Brooks wondered if there could now be a "progressive resurgence". There is a precedent. After an earlier Louisiana disaster, the floods of 1927, there was public outrage that not a single federal dollar had gone to feed or shelter the victims: the army had even demanded reimbursement from the Red Cross for the use of its tents. From now on, the public resolved, the federal government would have to protect the vulnerable. That shift paved the way for the activism of FDR and all that followed. Nearly 80 years on, history might be about to repeat itself.

Finally, America will have to get over the shock of seeing itself in a new, unflattering light. It is not just the lawlessness, violence and gun culture that has been on show in New Orleans. It is also that America likes to think of itself as the "indispensable nation", the strongest, richest, most capable country on the face of the earth.

That belief had already taken a few blows. The vulnerability exposed on 9/11 was one. The struggle in Iraq - where America has become a Gulliver, tied down - was another. But now the giant has been hit again, its weak spot exposed. When corpses float in the streets for five days, the indispensable nation looks like a society that cannot take care of its own. When Sri Lanka offers to send emergency aid, the humiliation is complete.

That could lead to a shift in priorities, a sense that too many energies were diverted to Iraq and Afghanistan and away from the home front. It could even see the US retreating from the world and hunkering down.

But don't count on it. At the end of the 1970s, American confidence was also shaken - by defeat in Vietnam, by the serial failure (and worse) of government institutions. What followed, after the interval of the Carter presidency, was a period of gung-ho bullishness that became the Reagan era. It may look battered - but only a fool would count America out.

[Modificato da Corcaigh 05/09/2005 10.58]

Io amo quest'uomo...

www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/nagin.transcript/

Dacci oggi la nostra Katrina

Caro direttore, in questo oceano (o inondazione?) di articoli, immagini e filmati (ormai nell'era di Internet è possibile guardare le tragedie in diecimila diversi modi) relativi a New Orleans l'unico pensiero che mi è venuto è quello che in tutti gli avvenimenti tragici a rimetterci sono sempre i poveracci.
Che si chiami guerra in Irak o uragano Katrina alla fine soffre sempre chi ha meno possibilità e chi è meno fortunato. Scusi per il pensiero banale, ma penso che in certi casi bisogna porre la pietà nei confronti di tante persone davanti ai discorsi politici.
Con grande stima, XXXXXXXXXXX

Caro XXXXX, nella inondazione di lettere che ho ricevuto sulla castastrofe di New Orleans, della Lousiana e della costa del Mississipi, ho scelto una sola mail, la sua, per mancanza di tempo e per la elementare verità che essa esprime. Ci sarà tempo e, spero voglia, negli Stati Uniti d'America per cercare quali responsabilità politiche e amministrative, locali e nazionali, abbiano esasperato, prima, durante e dopo, gli effetti dell'uragano, anche se questa Amministrazione Bush ha purtroppo pessimi precedenti in materia di assunzione di responsabilità.

Ma la sola verità incontestabile venuta da New Orleans è stata la rivelazione di quanta, lunghissima strada debba ancora fare questa grande, ammirevole e presuntuosa nazione prima di poter affermare di avere tradotto la retorica della democrazia e dell'eguaglianza nella esistenza quotidiana reale di tutti i suoi cittadini e soprattutto, come dice quel Cristo nominato invano dai falsi profeti che brulicano in questa terra, nella vita "del più piccolo del miei fratelli".

Li abbiamo visti, i più piccoli dei nostri fratelli. Non erano immigrati clandestini, "zingari stupratori" come si dice nell'Italia della nuova ferocia, sospetti terroristi incarcerati ad Abu Grahib o a Guantanamo. Erano, e sono, cittadini americani a pieno titolo esattamente come Bush, come Bill Gates, come George Clooney, come me, che l'alluvione ha fatto emergere dalla indifferenza e dal cinismo con il quale sono guardati e trattati. E hanno, naturalmente, pagato il conto.

Provi ora a immaginare che sarebbe successo se dentro quella povera città terzomondizzata, in quel lager di cemento dello stadio coperto, ci fossero stati 20 mila studenti di Harvard o di Yale figli delle migliori famiglie, un migliaio di stelle del rock, di attori di Hollywood, dello sport professionale, o i parenti dei 435 deputati o dei 100 senatori magari con le due figlie di Bush. Sarebbero arrivati i paracadutisti, i Rangers e la Delta Force la sera stessa, non qualche corriera sei giorni dopo, come è avvenuto.

L'uragano, e i colossali danni collaterali che esso ha provocato anche per la imprevidenza, la corruzione, l'indifferenza degli uomini che hanno moltiplicato gli effetti della furia naturale, ha sollevato il coperchio da una pentola umana e civile che sarà presto ricoperta, perché è più facile predicare agli altri che fare in casa propria, dimenticare che ricordare, esportare all'estero i nobili principi che non si vogliono applicare. Katrina, a New Orleans, abitava a anche prima e tornerà ad abitare anche quando la solidarietà emotiva e l'indignazione sentimentale saranno evaporate. Infuria un uragano ogni giorno, nelle paludi della povertà urbana e del razzismo.

(5 settembre 2005)

Questo sì che è un bell'articolo: www.thewormbook.com/helmintholog/archives/001560.html
Leggetelo e scanniamoci

Cuba manda 30 dei suoi medici a New Orleans. Dopo anni di un embargo pesantissimo, specie sul fronte dei medicinali per i motivi che si può ben immaginare.
Cuba non è il paradiso, c'è la dittatura, Castro ha molti scheletri nell'armadio. Verissimo. Ma la notizia si commenta da sola.

Gli scheletri nell'armadio li hanno tutti, compresi i "nostri beneamati" statunitensi: New Orleans è il caso più eclatante........... ma quante storie abbiamo già sentito? La Grande Democrazia che incombe su di noi peggio del Grande Fratello non è poi cosi luccicante come gli statunitensi vogliono farci credere

L'Irlanda manda un milione di euro. Una cifra simbolica, quasi nulla, ma che simbolicamente servirà a ricostruire una famosa scuola di musica andata distrutta a New Orleans. La Thailanda sta raccogliendo fondi da inviare.
La lista continua.

Che dire? Se lo sono rieletto, mo' se lo tengono

Che l'Europa debba mandare aiuti umanitari e monetari agli Stati Uniti è davvero da tragica barzelletta....Il gigante dai piedi d'argilla si sta sgretolando e noi coglioni subito pronti come al solito a tentare di recuperare i cocci.
Da europeista convinta quale sono il mio sogno più grande (o utopia, meglio), sarebbe quello di vedere davvero un'Europa unita, e non dall'Euro che alla fine fine è solo una stronzata che ha impoverito tutti, quanto in senso politico e militare, senza dover sempre finire per leccare il culo agli americani.

Sarà contento il redento Bush, di Katrina: gli ha tolto dalle palle diecimila poveretti, per la maggioranza neri, che nessuno tanto si cagava comunque da prima, basti vedere in che case vivessero e come vengono trattati ora, da criminali che vanno tenuti al guinzaglio dal'esercito se rubano un pesce morto galleggiante per disperazione fame e quant'altro.
Si parla di stupri, di esercito mandato a controllare gli sciacalli infatti: sciacalli? Quelli c'hanno fame, c'hanno freddo, e adesso pure il colera!!! Stupri? Mah, con quello che è successo, c'è anche gente che va in giro con l'acqua all'altezza delle orecchie a scoparsi nonnette e nipotine???

Cristo santo quanto vorrei vedere Bush sprofondare sotto una valanga di fango e di merda, e con lui tutti quegli imbecilli razzisti e tronfi nella loro ignoranza pseudo cristiana e tanto guerrafondaia che lo hanno votato.

Io credo che quando la gente comune, povera o ricca che sia, soffre e sta male e ha bisogno di aiuto, non esistono bandiere.
Aiutargli non significa leccargli il culo ... significa aiutarli e basta.

Stupri, sciacallaggi, ci sono stati, eccome, e non solo per un pezzo di pane. Bande organizzate, delinquenti qualsiasi, addirittura attrezzati da sub per andare nelle case abbandonate e rubare tutto quello che si può rubare.
Certo, è la disperazione, la disperazione della povera gente che porta a questo.
E io mi auguro che questa tragedia serva per fargli capire che cosa ha provocato e provoca tutt'ora la politica espansionistica di Bush&C in giro per il mondo ... le scene che si sono viste a New Orleans non sono poi molto diverse dalle immagini che quotidianamente ci arrivano dall'Iraq o dall'Afghanistan: disperati, disposti a tutto perchè tanto non hanno niente, e allora cosa gli cambia morire di fame o per una fucilata?
Magari questa tragedia servirà a risvegliare le coscienze degli americani e li spingerà a liberarsi di Bush. O magari no.
Intanto non vedo perchè non dovremmo aiutarli.

---

Scritto da: Dark Icon 08/09/2005 11.20
Che l'Europa debba mandare aiuti umanitari e monetari agli Stati Uniti è davvero da tragica barzelletta....Il gigante dai piedi d'argilla si sta sgretolando e noi coglioni subito pronti come al solito a tentare di recuperare i cocci.
Da europeista convinta quale sono il mio sogno più grande (o utopia, meglio), sarebbe quello di vedere davvero un'Europa unita, e non dall'Euro che alla fine fine è solo una stronzata che ha impoverito tutti, quanto in senso politico e militare, senza dover sempre finire per leccare il culo agli americani.

Sarà contento il redento Bush, di Katrina: gli ha tolto dalle palle diecimila poveretti, per la maggioranza neri, che nessuno tanto si cagava comunque da prima, basti vedere in che case vivessero e come vengono trattati ora, da criminali che vanno tenuti al guinzaglio dal'esercito se rubano un pesce morto galleggiante per disperazione fame e quant'altro.
Si parla di stupri, di esercito mandato a controllare gli sciacalli infatti: sciacalli? Quelli c'hanno fame, c'hanno freddo, e adesso pure il colera!!! Stupri? Mah, con quello che è successo, c'è anche gente che va in giro con l'acqua all'altezza delle orecchie a scoparsi nonnette e nipotine???

Cristo santo quanto vorrei vedere Bush sprofondare sotto una valanga di fango e di merda, e con lui tutti quegli imbecilli razzisti e tronfi nella loro ignoranza pseudo cristiana e tanto guerrafondaia che lo hanno votato.

---

devi proprio odiarli tanti 'sti americani.

[Modificato da Matteo, Berghem 08/09/2005 14.30]

To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush:

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.

I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.

Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?

When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?

When men who never served in the military and have never seen young men die in battle send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?

Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?

Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?

With the nation's debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?

Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn't he say that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake.

That's not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr. Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this while New Orleans sank under water.

It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a flyover in his jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read "My Pet Goat" to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying "Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you're doing a heck of a job!"

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?

Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who wasn't up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren't up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?

I have an idea, and it isn't a horse show.

Yours,
Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com

Dal Wall Street Journal del 9 settembre: "Rep. Baker of Baton Rouge [repubblicano, ndr]: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." (Abbiamo finalmente fatto piazza pulita delle case popolari di New Orleans, noi non c'eravamo riusciti, ma Dio c'è riuscito)