“I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the US government, but the heart of the American people, and I think it has paid great dividends for us.”
Condoleeza Rice
As the Washington warlords seized the wonderful opportunity provided by a meterological event which even the US figurehead acknowledged was “not a normal hurricane,” and the heart of the American people in what one TV commentator called a “Pavlovian response,” wrote out checks to behemoth charities unable and/or unwilling to present any serious opposition to US policies for the disaster region, no one can question that Katrina will be paying great dividends to Halliburton, Bechtel et. al. for years, maybe decades to come.
The “levee break” and subsequent 1927 replay flooding of the poor (and mostly black) section of New Orleans was first reported on CNN right around midnight on Monday night/Tuesday morning by a Tulane Medical Center interviewee.
It is fair to ask why, since the hurricane itself had passed on Sunday, why those areas of Mississippi and Louisiana to the west of New Orleans had not been inundated with all kinds of aid by Monday night, but it is recommended that important respiratory activity not be suspended while awaiting the answer.
By Tuesday afternoon, as the waters rose, and the poor with the strength to do so hacked holes in their roofs and huddled in their attics, and America empowered some with the choice of deciding if they and their families would perish of suffocation, drowning, or being burned alive, offers of international aid began to take on the subtlest of tones of bewilderment and alarm: If you prefer not to rescue them, will you PLEASE let us do it? was the between the lines message of offers such as one from Honduras, locked in a perpetual nose to nose with Haiti for the Poorest Nation in the Western Hemisphere Award, as they offered 135 experts in the art of rescuing people from floods, a subject with which they are intimately familiar.
If there was a watershed moment, a teachable moment, a window, one of those moments where time stands still and the course of history is determined, that would have been between Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon, when right there for anyone to see on the TV were live feeds of evidence that Washington in its wisdom had decreed that it would be best if thousands of its weakest, poorest citizens and residents were allowed to perish.
That was the time when, if it was going to happen, millions of Americans of all races and economic conditions would have hit the streets however they could, and made their way to New Orleans to spread some Resolve onto the handful of gunmen stationed at the city’s entrance to prevent their entry.
Of course this is an unrealistic notion. The US mainstream is quite willing to write a check, even hop in the SUV and put in a couple of hours at the shelter for any victims who were allowed to survive, but all in all, the loss of even a large number of poor people of color is not seen as a national tragedy. In fact many expressed with characteristic American optimism that it was high time that New Orleans was cleaned up.
But what about Jesse Jackson? What about Al Sharpton? Louis Farrakhan? If ever there was a moment for a million man march, if ever there was a time to march to the sea to make salt, a time for any someone who considers themselves any kind of “leader” of these most vulnerable members of the American family, to sound the call to incite a jihad convoy, to storm both the gates of the Crescent City and the White House with the modern day equivalent of peasants with pitchforks, this was it.
Would there have been deaths? Yes. The first few thousand would in all probability, have been shot. If there were millions behind them to take their place, those deaths would have bought a future for untold millions of human beings of all races.
But there were no millions, no thousands, and maybe Jesse and Al and Louis knew that. There would be no Dr. King, no Gandhiji, no Toussaint L’Ouverture, not even a General Vaval to step into history and lead the people out of Egypt land.
Even when such an unlikely voice of the oppressed as Fox News’s Shepherd Smith screamed “Let them out” as late as Thursday did Jesse or Al or Louis deceive themselves into thinking they could do anything more than schedule interviews, take some politicians and reporters down with a bus for a handful and a media story, amass a few volunteers to tend to the lucky ones in shelters.
When history called, when opportunity knocked, there were no leaders to answer, nor were there followers. No significant spontaneous protests, no Bastille storming, the underclass gazed into the screen, saw its own future, and elected not to raise torch and pitchfork.
The incurable optimists among us are free to hope, of course, that somewhere, there are whispers, looks, nods, that there is a Toussaint, a Gandhiji, somebody, who has not revealed himself, or herself, who may not even know his identity, his destiny, maybe he is not even grown yet. Maybe he is one of those little fat cheeked faces of the Missing Children on CNN, or one of the glowering little faces we see in the feeds from the “shelter” camps, who watched his grandma die of thirst, for whom seeing his mother’s shame as she handed her clothing over to be searched before stepping in to strip herself nude in front of hundreds of women she did not know in order to enjoy the privilege of a shower was the moment that will define him, and the future of the US, forever.
