Et al.

Despair

Today, I am giving in to despair. Every channel is alternating "retrospectives" of Rehnquist's glorious career with more coverage of the "heroes" who finally have the chance, nearly a week later to try to pull the living from amongst the dead in New Orleans. Don't get me wrong--I have nothing but respect and admiration for the rescue teams, the national guard members, the city servicepeople, and the emergency workers on the front line. What appalls me is how little they have been allowed to do before now. Tucked way back in the end of the front section of our local papers are little news stories like the one about the navy ship with 1200 sailors, hospital beds, and the capacity to make that sat, for days, off the coast "waiting to be asked for help" while the young, the old, the sick, and the overwhelmed died in the heat and the filth of New Orleans's streets. Also buried: the righteous indignation of New Orleans's mayor, who pulls no punches in his anguish over the decimation of his city, its residents, and the rescue workers who have begun succumbing to suicide in their despair at our collective failures.

Rescue workers speak of plucking the few living from among the numberless dead, of knowing that for so many they came just a day or two too late. One man told of being dropped into a hospice where half of the residents had already died, and those who lived on lay among the bodies. Weeping mothers tell of their missing children, friends speak of those who died right before their eyes, waiting for the help that never came. How, in the richest and most powerful nation--bar none--that the world has ever seen, can anyone possibly believe that this is anything less than a cavalier disregard for the value of certain human lives, or that this motivated "incompetence" is the price of our national obsession with wealth, and with the so-called Christian sexual morés at the expense of the basic compassion Christ himself would have us practice?

I feel very, very far away from this country right now--perhaps farther than I ever have. Before, I've always believed in our ability to rekindle and live up to our ideals. Now, I doubt everything but our national greed and hypocrisy. I know that there are lots of caring people opening hearts and wallets right now, and that there are many who feel outraged like I do. But instead, I can only feel like I've run into the wall of intractable American racism in its 21st century incarnation. I feel guilty for not having had to face the brunt of it more fully before now, even as I have been well aware of its presence. I'm sick of living in a country where the hypocrisy is so blatant, and where it's so easy to dismiss the criticisms of the very obvious racism underlying this tragedy as the talk of the lunatic leftist fringe, or as the product only of divisive African American voices (like the mayor, like Kanye West).

We hosted a family gathering yesterday. Although my in-laws are not particularly warm people, it was, overall, a relatively pleasant event. Except for the moment when the football game was interrupted by footage of the desperate poor still trapped in New Orleans. At this point, two members of the family exchanged a series of unspeakably racist comments about the relative "uselessness" of the victims, and their unfittedness for a new life somewhere out of the cesspool their homes have become. "We've supported them for years," said one family member; "I can't believe people are going to want to pay to get them back on their feet."
"We've supported them for generations," commented the other, referring, presumably, to the historical effects of welfare and the disproportionate poverty and blackness of the victims. "They're not the kind of people anyone [i.e., anyone "decent"] would want in their communities. I don't know where we could put them."

What astounds me about this encounter? I knew these people were bigots. I know they consider themselves the arbiters of "decency" and are firmly convinced that by the state of man's lawn wilt thou know his soul, that "good people" wash their cars every week and that plenty of folks of other races are fine as long as they are "just like us" (refer to state of lawn, above).

It's the casual dismissal of an entire group of people, and their utter lack of embarrassment about it. Their total complacency at writing off thousands of helpless men, women, and children because their skin is the same color as that of several of the looters and lawbreakers featured on TV. Their absolute ease at saying something so hateful, at never mentioning the word "race" because, at this all-white family gathering, it would be so patently obvious that victims this depraved could only be black. Have we lost so much ground in the war on racism that we don't even have to pretend any longer that we are not racist? Evidently for a lot of white folks, the answer is yes. Bush is in the whitehouse, the leftys are on the run, and we can all feel good about blaming the victims. Human kindness is only for those who can get along without a functioning government in times of disaster.

Welcome to the era of "neo-individualism." If your family fate, like our president's, is to be legacied into an ivy-league school for which you are intellectually unfit, to be given corporations to run into the ground until one succeeds despite you, and to be handed the presidency by the morally bankrupt machinations of your father's wealthy friends, the new "individualism" is gonna look pretty great. If, however, your "legacy" has anything to do with bad luck, ill health, poverty, or dark skin, you might as well get used to being roadkill.

Do I need to mention that the family's representatives of evangelical Christianity, who are so holy that they usually forego family events to be with their "Christian" family, said nothing. Remember that golden rule? I guess we'd better make that the "pearl rule": Do unto white people as you would expect white people to do unto you. Wasn't that what Jesus (clearly a white man) said?

Is this a great goddam country, or what?

posted by Unknown @ 2:30 PM