#1
Posted: 9/8/05 at 8:16pm
A long read but worth it.
>September 7, 2005
>Hurricane Katrina and American Priorities
>I hesitated at first to write about Hurricane Katrina and the devastation
>that has been visited on the city of New Orleans and the people of
>Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Television stations have been giving
>24-hour-a-day coverage to this almost unimaginable disaster. American
>citizens have been both numbed by the tragedy and overwhelmed by
>frustration at their inability to help. There seems little more to be said.
>Two other things fed my initial hesitancy. First, during the whole course
>of this storm, I had been in Europe on a lecture tour that began in Sweden
>on August 25 and will not conclude until September 28 in England. So I
>possessed only a European lens through which to view this disaster. I
>wondered if that limitation would hinder my ability to assess this story
>fairly.
>My other source of hesitancy resided in the fact that my travels throughout
>the world in the past five years have made me aware of the unpopularity of
>the Bush administration on every continent and I feared that Europe's
>coverage of this tragedy might reflect this negative bias. Even in Great
>Britain, America's staunchest ally, the attitude toward our present
>government is overwhelmingly hostile. Tony Blair would have fallen by now
>if he had any viable opposition. The unpopular and ill-conceived war in
>Iraq is a major part of that world opinion, but that war served only to
>exacerbate already existing feelings of a perceived America First mentality
>that is insensitive to the needs of other nations. Perhaps that feeling was
>born on the first day of the Bush presidency when the president cut off all
>funding to family planning clinics around the world that might do abortion
>counseling. The approval of his religious constituency was placed ahead of
>the needs of human beings in the poorest countries of the world. Perhaps it
>grew with America's withdrawal from the Kyoto treaty on global warming
>when, right or wrong, profits for American businesses were deemed to be
>more important than our world's common environment. Southern Hemisphere
>nations are already today altering their lifestyles to deal with the
>reality of Antarctica's ozone depletion that stems, ironically enough, from
>Northern Hemisphere pollution.
>The way this administration treated the United Nations in general and Hans
>Blix in particular fed this growing negativity. This Swedish diplomat, who
>chaired the UN's team investigating the presence of weapons of mass
>destruction in Saddam's Iraq, had reported that these weapons were in all
>probability nonexistent. No one in this administration was pleased with
>these findings, though it turned out Blix was right. Perhaps it was because
>this nation plunged into the Iraqi conflict unilaterally, with its "shock
>and awe" campaign of bombing before the Blix report was finished, with
>little international support and with the active opposition of France,
>Germany, and Russia. Perhaps this negativity was due in part to our
>apparent lack of concern with Iraqi civilian casualties, which to many of
>the world's people, whose skins are not white, was another expression of
>our latent racism. No matter what the reason, no government of this nation
>in my memory has been viewed with such intense suspicion and hostility as
>this one. So I wondered if I could trust the objectivity of these European
>accounts.
>Then it occurred to me that the people in America might be interested in
>how they are viewed from abroad. That would be a unique angle on this human
>trauma. After I had begun to work with that perspective, which was, I
>confess, anything but pretty, I finally came to a place where I could make
>computer connections and thus gain the ability to compare American coverage
>with European coverage. I looked at the story nationally through the New
>York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago
>Tribune. I sampled regional press outlets from Atlanta to Houston. Finally
>I read the very local coverage in New Orleans itself. I discovered the
>details were not substantially different in America, but the tone was. In
>America there was an embarrassment — a sense of shame — followed by a
>slowly developing sadness that the face of American poverty, suffering
>because of the incompetence of early efforts to help, was being flashed
>across the world. In Europe there was more of a sense of
>incomprehensibility that the world's greatest military and economic power
>could so totally bungle the rescue task. Those nations that depended on
>American power for protection quaked in their boots at our apparent
>impotence. Those nations that have always feared American power and
>potential intervention felt emboldened in their independence. Everywhere
>people wondered why it took five days before food and water, to say nothing
>of medicine and medical care, could reach the people trapped in that city.
>Was that all our nation could do to deal with a crisis, the slow approach
>of which had provided ten days' warning — and at least three of those days
>were focused specifically on New Orleans, which was clearly in the path of
>the storm's eye. If this was the best effort our nation could make to deal
>with a well-advertised natural disaster, what confidence could anyone have
>that this nation was ready to handle a terrorist attack that would come
>with little or no warning? Is the fact that our president was vacationing
>in Crawford, Texas — while this storm sped across the Atlantic and into the
>Gulf — symbolic of this government's attitude and of its state of
>preparedness for any tragedy? The president left Texas as the storm drew
>nearer but only to give an unrelated, fund-raising speech in California.
>Did that represent detachment from reality?
>There is always plenty of blame to go around when tragedy strikes a nation.
>Blame is nonpartisan. Pearl Harbor was struck in 1941 with a Democrat in
>the White House. September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina occurred on a
>Republican watch. Blame is normally diffused by claiming surprise for one's
>unpreparedness. It did not work at Pearl Harbor, since Japanese naval
>forces had been on their journey through the northern Pacific for days. It
>will not work now for an even more obvious reason. Several years ago the
>New Orleans daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune, ran a story about the
>state of unpreparedness of this city for meeting what it called the
>"inevitability of a massive hurricane making a direct hit on New Orleans"
>at some date in the future! That article described in eerie detail what
>would happen if the levees broke under the impact of the water surge from
>the storm. It chronicled the plight of the New Orleans poor, who, the
>article said, were predominantly black, and would be trapped in the city
>because they did not have cars in which to escape. It described the lack of
>plans for evacuation of the victims, for getting food and water to the
>survivors, for providing medical care for the chronically sick and aged.
>This article laid bare exactly the circumstances that have now happened.
>Any attempt on the part of any official to claim that no one anticipated
>the magnitude of this natural tragedy must be quickly dismissed as nothing
>more than political "backside covering."
>This tragedy called into question in a very public and emotional way the
>values that drive this nation. The world saw in graphic detail the plight
>of America's poor. They visually observed what we all know, that in this
>country the poor are in large measure identical with America's black
>population, making this nation's systemic racism inescapably visible to the
>world. Our black population has also been identical in large measure with
>the unemployed and underemployed. Many are poorly educated, living without
>proper diet or nutrition and apart from adequate health care, which in
>America is a business perk for the employed. The people of the world saw
>racial realities that this nation has preferred to keep hidden even from
>itself.
>Twice in the last four years our Congress has passed tax bills, lowering
>substantially the taxes that the richest 20 percent of our people pay,
>while our poorest citizens, numbering 40 million, have no health care. That
>same Congress also resisted mightily raising the minimum wage for our
>poorest citizens. Both were clear priority decisions. Then we watched
>middle-class jobs, which blacks have only recently begun to fill, be
>outsourced to cheaper labor pools in other nations, while minimum wage
>jobs, incapable of lifting a fully employed person above the poverty level,
>took their places. Americans, as well as the people of the world, know that
>the combination of the cost of the Iraqi war with those tax cuts has
>drained the capacity of this country to address its eroding infrastructure,
>repair its inner-city schools, or fund its No Child Left Behind educational
>program, all of which strengthen the lifeline of the poor. This hurricane
>also revealed how stretched the American armed services are, since National
>Guardsmen from the affected states are in Iraq and therefore not available
>to secure their own neighborhoods. The people of the world saw a nation
>that is today demonstrably incapable of stopping the violence in Iraq after
>more than three full years and is now being revealed as incapable of
>addressing violence at home also. They saw a nation that in the highly
>trumpeted and recently passed energy bill could not ask anyone to sacrifice
>or to pay extra for their Hummers and SUVs as a measure against the
>spiraling prices of gasoline and heating oil, which this winter will as
>usual land most heavily on the backs of the poor. That storm, more than
>anything else I could ever have imagined, revealed very publicly to the
>eyes of the entire world a dark side of America's life.
>I shudder that this was the vision of my country that the world saw so
>clearly. I am embarrassed by the priorities by which this nation seems to
>live. Above all, I resent the fact that the rhetoric of my religious
>tradition is being used politically today to cover the presence of greed in
>high places, an insensitivity toward the poor and the marginalized, and
>even to justify a war that was first of all unnecessary and now seems
>incapable of being brought to an end.
>The American people will over time, I am sure, address the tragedy of
>Hurricane Katrina with their usual generosity. Then I hope they will
>proceed to address the distorted priorities of this government by massive
>and immediate political pressure. If that fails I hope they will then vote
>for a new vision of America in the next election.
>— John Shelby Spong
>September 7, 2005
>Hurricane Katrina and American Priorities
>I hesitated at first to write about Hurricane Katrina and the devastation
>that has been visited on the city of New Orleans and the people of
>Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Television stations have been giving
>24-hour-a-day coverage to this almost unimaginable disaster. American
>citizens have been both numbed by the tragedy and overwhelmed by
>frustration at their inability to help. There seems little more to be said.
>Two other things fed my initial hesitancy. First, during the whole course
>of this storm, I had been in Europe on a lecture tour that began in Sweden
>on August 25 and will not conclude until September 28 in England. So I
>possessed only a European lens through which to view this disaster. I
>wondered if that limitation would hinder my ability to assess this story
>fairly.
>My other source of hesitancy resided in the fact that my travels throughout
>the world in the past five years have made me aware of the unpopularity of
>the Bush administration on every continent and I feared that Europe's
>coverage of this tragedy might reflect this negative bias. Even in Great
>Britain, America's staunchest ally, the attitude toward our present
>government is overwhelmingly hostile. Tony Blair would have fallen by now
>if he had any viable opposition. The unpopular and ill-conceived war in
>Iraq is a major part of that world opinion, but that war served only to
>exacerbate already existing feelings of a perceived America First mentality
>that is insensitive to the needs of other nations. Perhaps that feeling was
>born on the first day of the Bush presidency when the president cut off all
>funding to family planning clinics around the world that might do abortion
>counseling. The approval of his religious constituency was placed ahead of
>the needs of human beings in the poorest countries of the world. Perhaps it
>grew with America's withdrawal from the Kyoto treaty on global warming
>when, right or wrong, profits for American businesses were deemed to be
>more important than our world's common environment. Southern Hemisphere
>nations are already today altering their lifestyles to deal with the
>reality of Antarctica's ozone depletion that stems, ironically enough, from
>Northern Hemisphere pollution.
>The way this administration treated the United Nations in general and Hans
>Blix in particular fed this growing negativity. This Swedish diplomat, who
>chaired the UN's team investigating the presence of weapons of mass
>destruction in Saddam's Iraq, had reported that these weapons were in all
>probability nonexistent. No one in this administration was pleased with
>these findings, though it turned out Blix was right. Perhaps it was because
>this nation plunged into the Iraqi conflict unilaterally, with its "shock
>and awe" campaign of bombing before the Blix report was finished, with
>little international support and with the active opposition of France,
>Germany, and Russia. Perhaps this negativity was due in part to our
>apparent lack of concern with Iraqi civilian casualties, which to many of
>the world's people, whose skins are not white, was another expression of
>our latent racism. No matter what the reason, no government of this nation
>in my memory has been viewed with such intense suspicion and hostility as
>this one. So I wondered if I could trust the objectivity of these European
>accounts.
>Then it occurred to me that the people in America might be interested in
>how they are viewed from abroad. That would be a unique angle on this human
>trauma. After I had begun to work with that perspective, which was, I
>confess, anything but pretty, I finally came to a place where I could make
>computer connections and thus gain the ability to compare American coverage
>with European coverage. I looked at the story nationally through the New
>York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago
>Tribune. I sampled regional press outlets from Atlanta to Houston. Finally
>I read the very local coverage in New Orleans itself. I discovered the
>details were not substantially different in America, but the tone was. In
>America there was an embarrassment — a sense of shame — followed by a
>slowly developing sadness that the face of American poverty, suffering
>because of the incompetence of early efforts to help, was being flashed
>across the world. In Europe there was more of a sense of
>incomprehensibility that the world's greatest military and economic power
>could so totally bungle the rescue task. Those nations that depended on
>American power for protection quaked in their boots at our apparent
>impotence. Those nations that have always feared American power and
>potential intervention felt emboldened in their independence. Everywhere
>people wondered why it took five days before food and water, to say nothing
>of medicine and medical care, could reach the people trapped in that city.
>Was that all our nation could do to deal with a crisis, the slow approach
>of which had provided ten days' warning — and at least three of those days
>were focused specifically on New Orleans, which was clearly in the path of
>the storm's eye. If this was the best effort our nation could make to deal
>with a well-advertised natural disaster, what confidence could anyone have
>that this nation was ready to handle a terrorist attack that would come
>with little or no warning? Is the fact that our president was vacationing
>in Crawford, Texas — while this storm sped across the Atlantic and into the
>Gulf — symbolic of this government's attitude and of its state of
>preparedness for any tragedy? The president left Texas as the storm drew
>nearer but only to give an unrelated, fund-raising speech in California.
>Did that represent detachment from reality?
>There is always plenty of blame to go around when tragedy strikes a nation.
>Blame is nonpartisan. Pearl Harbor was struck in 1941 with a Democrat in
>the White House. September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina occurred on a
>Republican watch. Blame is normally diffused by claiming surprise for one's
>unpreparedness. It did not work at Pearl Harbor, since Japanese naval
>forces had been on their journey through the northern Pacific for days. It
>will not work now for an even more obvious reason. Several years ago the
>New Orleans daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune, ran a story about the
>state of unpreparedness of this city for meeting what it called the
>"inevitability of a massive hurricane making a direct hit on New Orleans"
>at some date in the future! That article described in eerie detail what
>would happen if the levees broke under the impact of the water surge from
>the storm. It chronicled the plight of the New Orleans poor, who, the
>article said, were predominantly black, and would be trapped in the city
>because they did not have cars in which to escape. It described the lack of
>plans for evacuation of the victims, for getting food and water to the
>survivors, for providing medical care for the chronically sick and aged.
>This article laid bare exactly the circumstances that have now happened.
>Any attempt on the part of any official to claim that no one anticipated
>the magnitude of this natural tragedy must be quickly dismissed as nothing
>more than political "backside covering."
>This tragedy called into question in a very public and emotional way the
>values that drive this nation. The world saw in graphic detail the plight
>of America's poor. They visually observed what we all know, that in this
>country the poor are in large measure identical with America's black
>population, making this nation's systemic racism inescapably visible to the
>world. Our black population has also been identical in large measure with
>the unemployed and underemployed. Many are poorly educated, living without
>proper diet or nutrition and apart from adequate health care, which in
>America is a business perk for the employed. The people of the world saw
>racial realities that this nation has preferred to keep hidden even from
>itself.
>Twice in the last four years our Congress has passed tax bills, lowering
>substantially the taxes that the richest 20 percent of our people pay,
>while our poorest citizens, numbering 40 million, have no health care. That
>same Congress also resisted mightily raising the minimum wage for our
>poorest citizens. Both were clear priority decisions. Then we watched
>middle-class jobs, which blacks have only recently begun to fill, be
>outsourced to cheaper labor pools in other nations, while minimum wage
>jobs, incapable of lifting a fully employed person above the poverty level,
>took their places. Americans, as well as the people of the world, know that
>the combination of the cost of the Iraqi war with those tax cuts has
>drained the capacity of this country to address its eroding infrastructure,
>repair its inner-city schools, or fund its No Child Left Behind educational
>program, all of which strengthen the lifeline of the poor. This hurricane
>also revealed how stretched the American armed services are, since National
>Guardsmen from the affected states are in Iraq and therefore not available
>to secure their own neighborhoods. The people of the world saw a nation
>that is today demonstrably incapable of stopping the violence in Iraq after
>more than three full years and is now being revealed as incapable of
>addressing violence at home also. They saw a nation that in the highly
>trumpeted and recently passed energy bill could not ask anyone to sacrifice
>or to pay extra for their Hummers and SUVs as a measure against the
>spiraling prices of gasoline and heating oil, which this winter will as
>usual land most heavily on the backs of the poor. That storm, more than
>anything else I could ever have imagined, revealed very publicly to the
>eyes of the entire world a dark side of America's life.
>I shudder that this was the vision of my country that the world saw so
>clearly. I am embarrassed by the priorities by which this nation seems to
>live. Above all, I resent the fact that the rhetoric of my religious
>tradition is being used politically today to cover the presence of greed in
>high places, an insensitivity toward the poor and the marginalized, and
>even to justify a war that was first of all unnecessary and now seems
>incapable of being brought to an end.
>The American people will over time, I am sure, address the tragedy of
>Hurricane Katrina with their usual generosity. Then I hope they will
>proceed to address the distorted priorities of this government by massive
>and immediate political pressure. If that fails I hope they will then vote
>for a new vision of America in the next election.
>— John Shelby Spong
