Katrina, Time for Revolution

by Carolyn Bennett

After week long images of displaced, desperate black Americans dubbed refugees and looters by a race-based U.S. press followed by race-based outrage from the usual headline grabbers, I must say something. But what can I say about death and disorder caused by Americans’ apart-ness, and flawed federal leadership?

Katrina did not have to break levees, flood cities, and destroy lives. What combined to cause horrendous deaths and despair, particularly in the jewel among the destroyed cities, was failed federal leadership, failure to care, and an apathetic, negligent people who failed to commit revolution before the hurricane.

Righteous religionists last week called New Orleans a city of “sin” and suggested it was high time that floods destroyed the city and cleansed the land. Religionists told their flock to throw money at the dispossessed and displaced but don’t touch - because the dispossessed are “tainted,” “lepers,” “colors of Cain.”

Don’t open your rich dwellings and cathedrals and retreat houses to the homeless and dispossessed because these people, “so unlike us,” resist leaving their Southland and their own kind. What these powerful religionists on the leading edge of society really mean is they themselves don’t want New Orleans people among them because, to them, New Orleans people are a people apart, a culture apart, a planet apart from their own kind. Religionists are diseased with bigotry and fear pushed by their patriarchs and spread by their women workers. So assuage the conscience: Throw money. Don’t touch. They are different. They are refugees, looters, rapists, sinners, uncivilized - all terms coined by and quoted in last week’s American press. The righteous religious are unhelpful because they hold “others” in contempt, inferior to themselves. And government is no better. In fact it is worse.

Tens of thousands were dispossessed and displaced in New Orleans, abandoned to die and to rot in streets filed with filthy water polluted with human waste and oil spilling from broken pipe lines because of governments’ criminal neglect. Federal leadership in Washington, D. C., committed two wars costing hundreds of billions in dollars and lives. And as costs rose (and still rise daily), federal leadership enacted permanent tax cuts for rich people, looked the other way when scores of businessmen defrauded their investors, filed for bankruptcy, raided employee pensions, failed to pay taxes ordinary citizens must pay, and recycled campaign finance monies to corporate mercenaries and war contractors. Having committed boat loads of unnecessary, reckless debt and deficit - leaving the United States at the mercy of China - federal leaders refused to hear the pleas from Louisiana to shore up and rebuild sinking levees that last Monday gave way in the wake of a storm called Katrina.

For violence against people in three states of these United States and for national and international trade and economic problems now and long after Katrina. For failure to repair, prepare and protect, we charge and hold responsible federal leadership - federal leaders failing in leadership. The shame evidenced by U.S. policy and practice and neglect at New Orleans is akin to the shame brought on America at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Cuba and Venezuela, verbally attacked by the U.S. government and Pat Robertson, stepped in with aid to New Orleans’ dispossessed homeless and hungry. Some reporters likened New Orleans to a war zone, a Third World country, Baghdad City, the U.S. South of the early 1900s.

Unlike some observers, I do not know what God or prayer has to do with the New Orleans tragedy in terms of cause, care, or retribution. But I do believe the president and his men and women are an incestuous and therefore incompetent and irrational lot who, again, have committed crimes against humanity. I believe further that part of the responsibility lies with an apathetic citizenry that had refused to commit revolution against corrupt government, top to bottom.

To commit revolution people must un-drug ourselves. Engage relentlessly. Not haphazardly, sporadically, nor wait until tragedies happen. Push government to respond on our behalf, on behalf of all Americans. On behalf of the structures and institutions supporting, defending and protecting all people of these United States. The federal government has passed out favors but failed to protect Americans from inside or outside threats. We are not a country in which some people are victims and others are givers of charity. Our law says we are equal under law. That means we have equal rights to the fruits of our labor and returns (levees and roads and rails and regulations) on our taxes. There is no entitlement to be rich or destiny to be poor. It is unconscionable to my mind that three quarters of New Orleans are black Americans and half of them desperately poor. And if drug trafficking and addiction were rampant in New Orleans adding to some of the unlawful behaviors last week, the drug problem did not start a few days ago. The ravages of addiction don’t happen that way - and the problem is and was up to local, state and federal governments to fix the problem. Addiction is a sickness needing help. Healing not neglect. Public servants and institutions must be compelled to serve all the people. This is the act of revolution that would have averted death, despair and displacement of tens of thousands of Americans.

What happened in New Orleans is not a “black” American problem- as corporate mass media, religionists and government would have it. Black Americans are Americans as surely as the head of Kodak or CBS or the corner drugstore. Americans are not refugees from a foreign country, or people apart from the United States. We are the United States of America. To commit revolution is to act like we are the United States of America. Do more than hope and pray. Words don’t mean a thing without action. Get rid incestuous government and graft. Petition government to work with states and local municipalities, to prepare andrepair our towns and cities and interstate routes and transports. Unite across lines traditionally at odds with one another. And hold officials accountable to all Americans. ■

Dr. Carolyn L. Bennett , author of Talking Back to Today’s News.. AVAILABLE FROM PUBLISHAMERICA.COM & THROUGH AMAZON. America’s human connection. E-mail: cwriter85@aol.com. http://journals.aol.com/cwriter85/TodaysMissingNews/. She lives in Rochester, New York.
Carolyn LaDelle Bennett, Ph.D., Writer/Journalist/Educator
Author of Talking Back to Today’s News
America’s Human Connection
http://journals.aol.com/cwriter85/TodaysMissingNews/
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