Wednesday, November 16, 2005

America: We Leave the Bodies to Rot

I'm sure that black Americans will love the fact that their government apparently doesn't care about finding the rotting corpses in New Orleans:

On Oct 3 the search for bodies in NOLA was called off despite the knowledge that bodies remained in unsearched homes in NOLA's 9th Ward (see previous post) The plan was for people to call 911 if they found a body despite the fact that people were not even allowed into the 9th ward. On October 12th, parts of the 9th Ward were opened for a "look and leave." The death toll rose as bodies were found. And the lower 9th ward, perhaps the most devastated area of NOLA, will not open to residents until December...

...It is a disgrace that this is happening in America. This is the country that took great pains to recover every little bit of human remains at Ground Zero after 9/11. Now we won't even bother to search homes in which we know bodies remain. This is not a matter of time or resources. The authorities simply chose not to take the time or allocate the resources to Do the Right Thing.
And more disgraceful is they are getting away with it. I have seen no reports of this other than 2 on CNN. Yet given the dozens of links and comments from my previous post I know people do care and were shocked to learn of this.
From Scout Prime.

What's sad is that there's probably no malice in this. It's just the horrible byproduct of the systemic short attention span. NOLA was a big event at the time, a real ratings machine... but now the people have moved on to chattering about that crazed woman on Trading Spouses, and their leaders to chattering about Bush's approval ratings.

Warhol was right, and we're living in his time, but he got it neatly reversed. He said that everybody gets their 15 minutes. He's wrong. Most people get nothing. What happened is that unless you're in the business of fame (ie: politics and entertainment), all you can get is 15 minutes.

That, and that this isn't television we're talking about, it's everybody.

(Link cred: Atrios.

No comments:

Post a Comment