No War But Class War! :: from www.uruknet.info :: news from occupied Iraq - ch
No War But Class War! :: from www.uruknet.info :: news from occupied Iraq - ch: "The majority of the faces I saw on the streets of New Orleans were African American. Their ancestors, as slaves, built this country, even as its original inhabitants, Native Americans (whose only sin was not having a strict enough immigration policy) were nearly eradicated by the divine imperative known as Manifest Destiny.
But I did not see 'black people (I know the word that many used, whether they spoke it or not) out of control,' looting and lawless. I did not see people undeserving of our compassion because they foolishly 'chose' not to flee to safety, or because they are somehow inferior in their sentience and humanity.
No. Many of us saw ourselves -- working people of all races, who live from week to week, month to month, often on far less than a living wage. We saw ourselves, and our mothers and fathers and grandparents and helpless children, abandoned by those who profit from our labor, but who return barely enough of what we produce for us to afford shelter, medical care, and food.
I am not African American. Neither are most of my friends and coworkers. It may then surprise our ruling class, of both parties, that we saw our own faces, our own children, our own unburied, bloating, dead loved ones in the streets of New Orleans.
It may surprise them that someone like me, a white woman with a college degree, would see, in those thousands of stranded, desperate people, my sisters and brothers, and that my heart would break and that I would be enraged. It has obviously come as a shock to George W. Bush and his insulated cadre of neoconservative imperialists that nearly everyone I know shares those feelings. We have spoken by phone, communicated by email, talked in the break room where I work, in tears and trembling with helpless outrage, over what appears to have been criminal negligence approaching genocide."
But I did not see 'black people (I know the word that many used, whether they spoke it or not) out of control,' looting and lawless. I did not see people undeserving of our compassion because they foolishly 'chose' not to flee to safety, or because they are somehow inferior in their sentience and humanity.
No. Many of us saw ourselves -- working people of all races, who live from week to week, month to month, often on far less than a living wage. We saw ourselves, and our mothers and fathers and grandparents and helpless children, abandoned by those who profit from our labor, but who return barely enough of what we produce for us to afford shelter, medical care, and food.
I am not African American. Neither are most of my friends and coworkers. It may then surprise our ruling class, of both parties, that we saw our own faces, our own children, our own unburied, bloating, dead loved ones in the streets of New Orleans.
It may surprise them that someone like me, a white woman with a college degree, would see, in those thousands of stranded, desperate people, my sisters and brothers, and that my heart would break and that I would be enraged. It has obviously come as a shock to George W. Bush and his insulated cadre of neoconservative imperialists that nearly everyone I know shares those feelings. We have spoken by phone, communicated by email, talked in the break room where I work, in tears and trembling with helpless outrage, over what appears to have been criminal negligence approaching genocide."
posted by Blackgold at 5:51 PM
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