Hurricane Katrina has come and gone, taking with her more than 1,000 lives. Rita is well on her way out, with only one reported death directly related to hurricane damage. I think we’ve all learned something – preventative measures are key.
President Bush certainly believes in preventative measures. He went out of his way to ignore concrete evidence and predict that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Bush even went to war to prevent an Iraqi weapon of mass destruction from hitting the United States. So maybe it would be more accurate to say that Bush pre-empted his post-9/11 fall in political capital by blaming terrorism on Iraq and attacking the country at will.
The Bush administration was all for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, but not one person took such a strike in evacuating the city of New Orleans.
Yes, money is always an issue. The subtext to the money is that no one in the Bush administration can even listen when environmental scientists say global warming could be one reason for a recent upsurge in dangerous storms. If the government has the power to allocate the billions of dollars it takes to deal with Katrina, they surely have the power to use scientific information as well as foresight and reduce greenhouse gases with the help of cleaner-burning fuel sources.
Speaking of preventative measures that can still save future disaster victims, it would do Bush well to remember that a reported 37 million Americans live in poverty. Aside from using phrases saturated in political correctness, Bush is doing very little to solve the problem of poverty. Bush claims that he can see the poverty/racism factors that resulted in Hurricane Katrina’s destruction, but policy decisions show only that there is a “great city” needing to be rebuilt.
Phrases drenched in political accuracy are of no help to the poor. New buildings do nothing to heal the poverty that led to so many citizens unable to escape their Great City as it flooded out from under them. Without a car to travel across freeways, without a television to even realize that there was a problem, New Orleans’ poorest had little choice but to perish where they stood.
Pouring money into new Gulf Coast development (potentially more than $200 billion) can’t save the poor from another hurricane; only government acknowledgment that the poor are important and necessary to our society can prevent another instance of unnecessary death.
The Bush administration showed its disregard for the poor long before Katrina hit, with a national policy of fewer welfare programs and more tax cuts. If Bush wants to repair hurricane damage and the damage done to his own image, he ought to use future policy decisions to prove he cares. Bush must show that in the wake of thousands of Katrina casualties and less than 100 Rita deaths, his administration has learned its lesson. No more ignoring the poor and disadvantaged until they are already dead and plastered across a television screen.
So where’s the funding and policy to at least attempt a solution to poverty?
A rebuilt city will likewise do little to end racism. Racism is an issue that Bush has admitted was related to the level of destruction in New Orleans. It seems that Bush is perfectly happy to oppose racism during his speeches, saying that America must “rise above the legacy of inequality,” but he is somewhat less likely to look at race when crafting his administration’s policy values.
Bush agrees that there is a link between race and poverty, yet he ignored the racism/poverty cycle in his stand against affirmative action. And then, here comes Hurricane Katrina, a skeptical nation and Bush’s lowest approval ratings ever. Now, Bush has no choice but to admit, in his own words, that the United States is home to a “history of discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.”
It’s not good that our president only acknowledges racism when his administration is accused of being racist. If Bush truly understood the connection between a history of discrimination and the loss of opportunity that still exists to this day, affirmative action wouldn’t even be a question. In the United States, the only sure way to repair poverty lies in access to higher education.
The Bush stance is clear: If no one is giving him criticism, the issue may as well not exist. Racism is pushed under the rug until a hurricane upends New Orleans. We know that sexism isn’t discussed in the context of rape and abortion; sexism is a non-issue until child prostitution rings are discovered. Bush doesn’t acknowledge homophobia when vying to make gay marriage illegal; homophobia is ignored until the national news reports that another young gay person has been killed by harassers. When does it end?
It ends as soon as our lawmakers get off their politically correct high horses and actually use their federal dollars and political power to do something about it. Even $200 billion can’t buy a fair fight against a hurricane. Dealing with the human element involved in exacerbating disasters is surely the most efficient and important route to healing.
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