I'm having a wonderful time this week, despite the sobering news from New Orleans. The weather has been unseasonably hot, but it's cool and pleasant here in the CyberBears studios. There are definite advantages to being in a thick concrete-walled building!
The news is so full of increasingly depressing stories about the tragic mismanageement of resources by the Federal Government around the storm relief in the gulf states. There's no doubt in anyone's mind that the foolish waste of life, time, and money that has been the invasion of Iraq is to blame for much of the suffering happening now in Louisiana and Mississippi.
The most sickening aspect of the news is the blatant avoidance of any mention about the racial inequity. Such a disproportionate percentage of those suffering now in the streets and washed-out buildings of New Orleans are people of color. Yet every report I see tries to focus in on the one or two white faces in the crowd, as if this is the time to pretend!
I firmly believe that there would have been more and better support for our disrupted American neighbors if the majority of those displaced by the storm had been of European extraction. And that's not the way it was supposed to be.
Of course, there would still be a great deal of suffering regardless. The real culprit is the brazen incompetence of letting such a well-anticipated event result in people dying of dehydration, simply because nobody had the resources to get bottles of clean water to the folks in New Orleans.
Even the refugees in the war in Afghanistan had anticipatory relief packets of food and water dropped from American airplanes.
I feel so safe and dry and frustrated here at home, watching the news. I urge everyone else who's also having a wonderful week to donate to the Red Cross, and say a prayer for our friends down there.