I cannot understand all the fuss about the government’s tepid response to Hurricane Katrina. To be perfectly honest, all this carping is getting to be rather tiresome. A ferocious hurricane hits the gulf coast and wrecks a major American city and countless small towns from Florida to Louisiana. Some people are killed and tens of thousands are left homeless. This kind of shit happens with unsurprising democracy all over the world every day. People die, they lose their homes, their jobs and their loved ones.
And not long after they have survived unspeakable horrors they hold even more firmly to their unimaginative beliefs in one sort of weirdly punitive deity or another and re-elect the same mendacious scoundrels who so recently were indifferent to their plight. What I want to know is why anybody with a three digit IQ, would think for one second, that this particular United States government would help them survive, much less recover, from a devastating hurricane? Do such people still believe that the earth is flat? When they put their hands over their hearts and say the Pledge of Allegiance do they really believe that stuff about “one nation” and “liberty and justice for all?” When some of them could not even walk across a bridge to dry land did they really think they were living in a democracy?
Ours is a government which is unabashedly wed to the richest one percent of multimillionaire non-taxpayers in this country. This is a government which has absolutely no compunction about lying to us about Al Queda and WMD’s and dragging us into a spurious, horrible war, and subsequently, dissembles about the need to drill for oil in a national wildlife refuge while SUV’s accelerate off the assembly lines. This is a government which cuts funds for education and wants to virtually eliminate Social Security. This government pretends global warming is a figment of effete liberal imaginations, feigns terror preparedness while cutting back on fire and police departments and squanders the nobility of our heritage with wanton torture of anybody with curly hair and swarthy skin.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can vote this current gang of war-mongers out and then move beyond this imbecilic American mantra of “no new taxes” and fork over some money and demand some recompense in the form of mass transit, good schools, libraries, parks and art funding, fire and police protection, universal health care, guaranteed housing, and old age security. I know; ha ha. The sun will start revolving around the earth before that happens.