By Judith Moriarty
9-3-5
I personally don’t give a tinker’s damn what political party one has aligned themselves with, or if they’re a bark eating Druid, living in a rusted bus in some cornfield to be closer to nature! This tragedy in our nation is an American issue, and a horror of monumental proportions. There is no other story. Today nobody is a lumbering elephant, or a hew-hawing jackass! People are dying-dying in the streets, dying abandoned in back alley homes and projects, and dying in hospitals filled with patients. There are doctors on TV begging for help for patients, trapped and surrounded with flood waters. Nurses are giving each other IV’s to keep going. There is NO water, no electricity, and no food in these hospitals, or on the streets, where tens of thousands wait. Many of those from nursing homes; the elderly are dying in their wheelchairs! Babies are dying and being born stillborn!
I am sickened to death and physically ill at the depraved indifference of many on the media, and of remarks I’ve heard from citizens. This guy Brown from FEMA, and all those other incompetent bureaucrats, are stumbling all over themselves, telling the nation that things are going fine-help is on the way-they’re doing their best-everyone is doing a swell job. Meantime scenes show the elderly slumped in their wheelchairs DEAD.
One commentator had the audacious, unmitigated, despicable gall to remark; that what the President needs now, is another 9-11 photo opportunity, similar to his draping his arm around the fireman and shouting through the megaphone, “I hear ya”. Well the President got his photo-opportunity, a few minutes ago on his walking tour in Mississippi, posing with a despairing Black family. Again, there was the arm draped over these suffering ones shoulders, as cameras clicked away. The other, satiated, shaved, and showered lackeys with him, stood by with vacant-baffled looks. Soon they’ll be back at the club sloshing down some tumblers of bourbon to kill the memory of it all.
The President, now back from vacation, with his shirt sleeves rolled up [the slumming look] said, “We’re making progress-we’re going to do it. If it’s not working right we’ll make it right. I’m goin’ delegate and get opinions from experts, especially those in New Orleans.” While the President was speaking; New Orleans was burning from numerous fires, including a chemical facility. A doctor from Tulane said, “The people are dying right now!” Hello-this isn’t any time to be forming another task force, or calling for another nonsensical hearing; with the results being that a magic bullet careened around Dallas and killed a President; or that people were out to lunch, taking a pee, or didn’t answer the phone, on the morning of 9-11, as planes crashed up and down the East coast!
Hundreds of thousands of people up and down the Gulf coast are wandering around in a war zone. With obscene billions being spent to scan people, fingerprint them, do body cavity searches on them, retina scans, et al, one would think that some attentions might have been focused on protecting them, and attending to them, in a time of a catastrophic event. But then there’s no profit in that! Every pig and his brother is in the Homeland Defense trough to grab what they can—and today we can see the results! New Orleans is all of America. What makes anyone think that any disaster in their state of this magnitude would be handled with any more efficiency? As it is, we can all see, that the real Homeland Defense is ordinary-unfunded American citizens; firemen, police, doctors, nurses, social workers, volunteers, the few church groups, the coast guard and the reservists!
And so the poorest, the most frail, the babies, the handicapped, the elderly, those trapped in Charity hospitals, have been left behind for lack of money, transportation or a tank of gas. The Foggy Bottom boys [and many others]; can’t relate to the poverty that cleans their toilets, makes the beds at their resort hotels, cleans their sumptuous offices, mows their lawns, serves their meals, cleans their clothes, sweeps their streets, cleans their office windows, parks their cars, work in their sweat shops, and empties the bedpans, in hospitals they can’t afford care in! These are the invisible people, the negligible, those, left behind. And in the midst of the death of a city and its people; Attorney General Charles Foti, of Louisiana [obviously absent for white collar corruption] remarked, as the city burns and the people die, that he wants those who loot for survival, shot, with the same vigor, as those who have looted for greed. Too bad we didn’t have Charlie and his Ninja troops, stationed outside the nation’s Savings and Loans, at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, or over in Iraq, where billions are missing. I know if I were hungry, and my kids were dying, and I came upon the AG’s house, I’d find the biggest rock I could and throw it through the front window. As for anarchy and the criminal element-rampaging and attacking people—yes, shoot them.
A city and its people are dying, and all we can hear is the blame game, or who we’re going to shootI heard my momma cry, I have to cry the week New Orleans died, and then there was no sound at all, but the clock upon the steeple, tick-tock, tick-tock.