Catastrophe shows us 2 Americas

Catastrophe shows us 2 Americas

Chip Johnson

Monday, September 5, 2005

There are hardly any souls in this country who want to believe their eyes when they glance at the faces of the refugees that Hurricane Katrina left behind to fend for themselves in the once-great city of New Orleans.

To see some of America's poorest residents, virtually all of them African American, scrap and fight for food, for water and for survival, only confirmed for many people that race and class divisions affect every portion of our nation's culture -- right down to providing emergency relief for people whose lives hang in the balance.

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Prominent Oakland defense attorney John Burris questioned how students at overwhelmingly white Tulane University were evacuated two or three days before students at Xavier University, which has a large number of black students including his son Jonathan. Those students were taken by buses to Grambling University, a historically black college north of New Orleans.

"The aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina illustrated to me that the poor and destitute Americans on the margins of our society looked poorer than people in Third World countries, and that was amazing to me,'' Burris said. "It's just a sad illustration of the economic strata of American life."

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Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, known nationally for her refusal to support military intervention in Iraq, was right on in her description of the New Orleans situation.

"If anyone ever doubted that there were two Americas, this disaster has made this division clear,'' she said in a statement. "Is this an example of the administration's idea of homeland security? If so, we are in trouble.''

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Very depressing. I will never understand how any black person can vote for those bigot conservatives. Even harder to understand is how any black can want to run on the repuke ticket. It's mind boggling.

The poor, the barely middle class to middle class who'll have to make adjustments for whooping gasoline and heating bills they'll be stuck with, and the ruling class. Don't forget that the ruling class and their surrounding court, the ones who benefit from the tax cuts, play wargames with the rest of us.

I recall an old Twilight Zone (?) episode (or was it from a movie?) back in the sixties that had people as pawns on a chess board while the rulers moved them about. If you got bumped off the board, you died. That's what they did to the Katrina victims, the Iraqi people, and the National Guard. Guess who's next.