I feel a bit reluctant to write about Hurricane Katrina. After all, I didn’t lose any family or friends, my house or my car. The only thing Katrina made me lose is my patience.
I’ve lost patience with the chorus of groups whose first response to this disaster was to try to score political points against the Bush administration.
No, this is not the United States’ “comeuppance” for not signing the Kyoto Treaty — which, by the way, would have done little or nothing to stop “global warming” and everything to cripple the U.S. economy. To those who’ve said Katrina wasn’t a tragedy — or that blue-staters shouldn’t donate relief — because Katrina hit red states, I have no words to express my disgust at your lack of humanity.
When everyone who needs help has gotten it, then we can start assigning blame — and there is plenty to go around — but a knee-jerk “it’s Bush’s fault” response is both ignorant and crassly opportunistic.
I’ve lost patience with people like Kanye West standing in front of a camera and trying to turn the already tense situation in New Orleans into a black-versus-white standoff.
“George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” he said. Right, West, I guess you weren’t paying attention when Bush did more to put minorities in positions of actual power than anyone before him did. West, Jesse Jackson and all the others who are turning this into a racial issue should be ashamed.
I have no patience for people like Randi Rhodes, who encouraged people to loot and riot in New Orleans — saying that because they’re poor they should be able to take what they want. (Though, thankfully, since she’s only heard on Air America, few people were listening.)
I have no patience with people who apparently went to the Jerry Falwell School of Theology. God did not send this hurricane to New Orleans to cancel a gay-pride parade or because of Mardi Gras. Maybe the leader of Repent America should go back to Matthew 5:45, where Jesus clearly states that God “causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
The Christian God I worship doesn’t devastate cities to wipe out individual sinners. Even if He did, I think He could find more important places to hit than New Orleans — such as Sudan, Saudi Arabia and China, where His people are persecuted daily.
And finally — there are more people I could write about, but column space runs short — I have lost my patience with neoconservatism. You can’t promote individual rights, freedoms and responsibilities while at the same time telling people they can survive off the welfare state. In the wake of Katrina, we saw what happens when people who only know how to subsist off the government find that the government is gone: chaos, anarchy, looting and firing on the rescue workers. Maybe if we’d been teaching people they don’t have to depend on the government for everything, this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe this will finally give paleo-cons the kick in the pants needed to reassert themselves over the Republican party. As much as I’ve supported many of President Bush’s policies, I hope he’ll be the last big-government Republican president.
Thankfully, there are responses to admire in this whole ordeal. Ordinary Americans have given overwhelmingly generously, more than $200 million by Friday; National Guard troops left their lives to go to the Gulf, bringing aid and hope, not knowing how long they would be there; Red Cross and Navy personnel have gone far beyond the call of duty.
Hopefully, these stories will be the ones getting the coverage, rather than those publicity predators who use the suffering of others to advance their own causes.
Write to Tim at
redbaron.strikesagain@gmail.com
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