From Sue:
Blacks, dogs, and foreigners are left to fend for themselves. Babies die in their parent’s arms from illness and heat exhaustion. Pets are ripped away from weeping hurricane victims by soliders and left to starve. Doctors and nurses, who have been hand ventilating the ill at Charity Hospital for days, euthanize their pets in makeshift gas chambers, rather than abandon them.
Now I hear that Bush is sending in the Marines.The Governor of Louisiana gloats that their guns are locked & loaded. The military tells the Red Cross to stay out of New Orleans, and photographers to stop taking pictures. I fear this is Tienamen Square, the sequel. The Chinese shoot symbols of free speech, and the U.S. shoot symbols of the oppressed and impoverished lowest classes? Are the 20,000 remaining in New Orleans no more than rioting prisoners in a makeshift SuperMax? Or are they fellow citizens: families, the elderly, the frail, the impoverished, the stupid, the mentally ill off their meds, the stuck.
Three days before the hurricane struck, I was asking Bob how the poor of New Orleans, with neither car, money for gas and lodging, nor a place to go, could possibly evacuate without help. Where were the buses? Where were the emergency shelters to the North and West? Why did nobody think of security, food, water, port-a-potties? Hasn’t anyone ever heard of a latrine trench and lime?
There is no such creature as a “compassionate conservative.” Our government has reneged on its duty to protect and provide for its people. No so-called “faith-based” charity lifted a finger to prevent this tragedy from unfolding in miserable slow motion.
The mind that chooses money over life is the mind of a monster. Capitalism has shown its toothy blood-stained smile. Who could believe now that an unrestrained “Free Market” would lead to anything but this … as Adam Smith himself said … every man for himself.