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From: marilyn
Date: 09 Sep 2005
Time: 10:28:14 AM
All excellent comments and forwarded posts; We are thinking about important issues and that is what is important. There is an old saying I am trying to recall--rusty memory, thoughts lost in a fog of disembodied sketches going back what seems a millennium. Oh, now I remember: "It won't change come hell or high water." The interbureau fighting between state, county, city and federal officials is surfacing like submerged refuse on the New Orleans streets. And it is good to reexamine preparedness and reassess which gov level should be attending to what task. When the flood hits, it is too late to haggle over jurisdiction or parameters. These heated debates will only serve the Bush regime's tactic to blame underlings and deflect their own culpability. That will be the stealth purpose of upcoming commissions scrutinizing how New Orleans was assaulted on August 29-30, 2005. Let me amend that: how it was allowed to be destroyed. Even given Mother Nature's wrath, even allowing for the inevitable fate of a city living on the edge since its birth, the real question is why vital food and water and transportation out were deliberately withheld until the population was reduced to helpless, hopeless thousands who walked mutely onto those errant buses. And it occurred to me that they were too tired and defeated to riot, too dehumanized to care. Of all the tragedies and horror descending on those citizens, that image hit me right where I live...and I remember seeing in the aftermath of WW11, liberated Nazi concentration camps in newsreels between a twin bill at my local theater. I was in grade school but those faces are tattooed on my subliminal mind; they come floating up when I view similar episodes across the decades. It is the dehumaizing of my fellow men and women and children who survived that haunts me most. The dead are spared their memories. The living bear the burden of recall. marilyn