... but nobody walked on sunshine.
One of the most powerful hurricanes in written memory has just hit the Southern United States after picking up speed in the Gulf of Mexico. The tragedy is real. The devastation is difficult to believe, let alone to witness. This is no tsunami -- had it been a tsunami, the losses would have been much heavier -- but it is still nature that is much stronger than humans.
I did not watch the news and all those yaketi-yakers t.v. people talking about this disaster. I read some of the news in the paper and on the Internet.
A few things caught my attention, not extraordinary things but nevertheless I'm pretty sure I have to write about them if I want to emphasize the meaning of all this and how it is possible (in some way) to see it from an angle where the cerebral and psychological numbing caused by overexposure to the white noise and extreme reiterations of the same impulses from one source (i.e. : unbrainwashed-by-the-news point of view).
I thought first of all that it was pretty ironic that the most backward and poor region of the U.S. is the one now most severely hit by the hurricane. Not only is that region desperately poor (as indicated by a recent poverty index from the U.S. Census bureau) but, again ironically, the region is one major channel through which oil arrives and becomes refined into the U.S. To add insult to injury, that very product does not only offer no help to alleviate the area's economic woes, but is actually partially the cause of the increase in frequency and severity of tropical storm of the region...
The amplitude of the catastrophe has yet to be evaluated and in effect, you see how the U.S. is failing at home with a simple hurricane. If it had spent a fraction of the amount it spent on the Iraq War, it could have quickly sent troops (not stationed in the Middle East) and come to the rescue of hundreds of people.
It was also a bit pathetic to see the poorest (those who could not afford a car or could not afford the payments for a car) huddled in the Superdome, which turned out to be not so super after all. The "shelter" quickly turned out to be a sweaty hell for the several thousands huddled inside. Not to mention the proof that American engineering can be just as bad as Quebecois engineering when it comes to stadium roofing...
The "lucky" ones who had time to evacuate the city will probably find their homes destroyed or looted or both.
All those casino barges mangled like a child playing roughly with toy boats.
All that praying to no avail. Unless God has a cruel sense of humour...
But the biggest surprise did not come from the U.S. nor from the hurricane (yes, it did not hit New Orleans with full force) but from abroad, in the form of aid from Venezuela. Chavez has ordered that Venezuela give a hand to the U.S. in this emergency situation. And to think that the C.I.A. and Pat Robertson wanted that guy killed...
Posted by phonono at août 31, 2005 12:54 AM