friends and colleagues: what follows is a call to action. i
would ask that you read it in its entirety because i believe
that the information contained here will spur you forward as
it has me. please pass it on to as many people as you can. thanks
in advance.—victoria brownworth
as many of you know, i used to live and work in the city that
is now the epicenter of the worst natural disaster in american
history. new orleans is imbedded in my heart and soul. it is
a recurring presence in my writing and it is a shadow that
follows me throughout me life. i love new orleans.
and now i weep for her and for those for whom she has become
a living hell.
i used to live in two of the places completely submerged by
water, now, places where all that can be seen are desperate
people or desperate animals or both running back and forth
on rooftops screaming for the help that seems nowhere in sight.
this morning i began my day in prayer for the survivors and
for the survivors of those who did not survive. and then i
watched george bush on good morning america.
no one i have spoken to about new orleans, even those generally
not given to sentiment, has been unmoved by the absolute horror
that is happening there. the abject, grinding, leveling horror.
except george bush.
abc anchor diane sawyer, once a speechwriter for richard nixon,
thus she has been in the company of evil before, kept asking
bush again and again: "why didn't you come back from vacation?" "why
hasn't there been aid sent yet?" "why are the mayor
and governor saying it's all too slow?" (after all, the
category five storm had been barreling down on the city for
more than a week before it made landfall late sunday night.)
and on and on.
behind the stumbling, inarticulate excuses and the unrelenting
smirks lay a man with absolutely no sense of the enormity of
either the tragedy or of his responsibility to try and make
right what his appalling inaction had exacerbated into the
very terrorism about which he talks so much.
as a reporter, as a journalist, as someone who has worked
in various avenues of human rights for three decades, i have
seen some awful things. i have images in my head that will
never be erased. some of those images were implanted in my
early days in the south. but the images of the last week have
been a new and distinct horror. and it would take a true sociopath,
i believe, to remain unmoved by what has been transpiring this
week in new orleans.
yet george bush is unmoved.
his interview with sawyer, in which he urged patience and
resolve—addressing thousands who had not had water or
food SINCE SUNDAY—was bad. his handlers must have been
grimacing throughout the hour. but his press conference later
this afternoon was ever so much worse.
bush reiterated his calls for patience, although he left out
the brutal line he had delivered to sawyer earlier: “i
know people wanted this done yesterday. but it's a big job.”
as if he hadn't gotten around to a chore like mowing the white
house lawn. as if people were not literally dying in the superdome,
on the roof of truro hospital a block from where i once lived,
on rooftops in the ninth ward where i once worked with the
poorest of new orleans many, many poor. dying for lack of water
and food in america, not darfur. in america, an hour and a
half from washington by plane. not a half a world away in africa.
the press conference reiterated the theme of patience and
then got to the heart of his concern: rising oil and gas prices.
of his eight minute speech, six were devoted to concerns over
gas.
people are dying on the streets and on the rooftops of the
city i love and the president, the man with the power to stop
it, to staunch the arterial bleeding, is concerned over whether
or not the suvs will have enough gas to run.
i won't mince words here. i could not be more filled with
rage. i am now declaring myself the cindy sheehan of this tragedy:
george bush is allowing my beloved town to die a hideous, agonizing
death. he is turning decent people whose only “crime” is
their poverty and their race into anarchists. he is turning
human beings—the elderly, small children, babies, mothers,
the disabled—into waste, left where they died to be picked
up later, perhaps, by some death cart out of the middle ages.
he is rendering one of the most beautiful, historic, intoxicating
places in this country into nothing more than an superating
wound of misery and pain, chaos and death.
how can he—how can we—bear the suffering
being inflicted on our fellow americans?
how?
there has to be a point where americans refuse to allow this
man to take any more lives through his laziness, his inaction,
his greed, his callousness, his “agenda.”
katrina began the suffering, but bush has done nothing to
salve it. this morning sen. mary landrieu said that between
12,000 and 16,000 were dead in new orleans. i heard at least
five reporters on five different newscasts today assert that
they had watched people die—at truro, at the superdome,
in the french quarter, in the cbd. one veteran photojournalist
from nbc who has covered many a horror went inside the superdome
today and took video and recounted what he saw. no one in charge,
a stench of dead bodies and raw sewage unimaginable, he said.
one nurse among more than 20,000 people. no water. no food,
no toilets. at the end, after watching a baby die, after pushing
dead bodies out of his way, he broke down. he wept. he could
not go on.
where are the president's tears? i know mine have not stopped
since sunday when the catastrophe was inevitable. but where
is that compassionate conservativism upon which he launched
his presidential tenure?
please, please, please: call the white house, call your senators,
call any person whose name you know in washington and protest
this hideous and callous disregard for america's poorest, most
helpless, most vulnerable people. demand that water be airlifted
to the city NOW, that food be dropped NOW, that the dying be
stopped NOW.
bush has asserted since 9/11 that his raison d'etre is to
keep terrorism from our shores.
take a look at anarchy unleashed by despair and hopeless and
fear and hunger and THIRST in new orleans: that is terrorism
on our shores and it was put there by bush's inaction. katrina
struck the city a powerful, near-fatal blow. but it has been
the abandonment of the thousands too poor to leave that has
turned the town lawless, that has escalated the dying.
imagine not having water, food, sleep, a shower—even
brushing your teeth or washing your face—for five looooooong
days. and all the while you are holding the hand of your tiny
child or sick parent or disabled neighbor or just rocking in
your own quaking fear, isolated amidst thousands just as terrorized
and desperate as you. and all the while you are wondering if
there will be anything of your life left to go home to if you
ever exit the hell you are now in.
that is the level of suffering that has driven the violence
in new orleans today. the majority of the looting has been
brought about by suffering—the suffering wrought by katrina
and the suffering wrought by a lifetime of poverty. there may
be some real villainy at hand there, in the roving gangs, in
the scattered rapists. but that would be any day in any city,
without the spur of so much chaos and misery.
for us, compassion for the victims must also be stoked by
our rage at the failure of the bush administration to act in
either a timely or even concerned fashion. have you ever seen—except
in the visage of a dictator like saddam hussein—such
utter lack of interest?
the head of fema, michael brown, spoke on the news tonight.
when nbc anchor brian williams asked him why none of the army
helicopters could just drop water on pallets to the city, brown
replied that he didn't know that there were peaceful (i.e.,
not looters) people waiting for water until that broadcast
and he had urged his people to get them services immediately.
the head of the relief operations didn't know what everyone
with a tv in the entire country knows? that thousands of people
are dying of dehydration in america a stone's throw from where
he sits?
then fire him.
please: be outraged, be as outraged as you would be if it
were your city, your families, your homes, your lives. this
is not a third world nation in which corrupt and violent leaders
keep life-giving services from the starving and dying.
this is america, friends. a nation of incomparable wealth.
but this week new orleans is indeed a third world city and
the president has uttered not a single phrase of care or concern,
just a revamping of his iraq speeches about “staying
the course” and “it will take years to rebuild.”
but what about now?
the people dying in new orleans AS YOU READ THIS do not have
the luxury of time or equivocation, smirks or shrugs.
be angry. get your friends angry. propel your anger into action
because a terrorist attack could indeed befall us one day,
augmented by bush's deadly foreign policies. should that fateful
day occur, we will all become like the poor suffering masses
of people in new orleans who but for their poverty, are you
or i.
make your voices heard, please. demand action now. express
just how appalled you are at the needless suffering, the needless
dying.
and don't forget to give what you can to the relief efforts.
we are so very fortunate it is not us—but it very well
could be us one day with this man in the white house for three
more years. let him know how you feel. now, today, before anyone
else dies at his hands. before we become any more complicit
in the blood he continues to spill.
thank you.
victoria brownworth
Victoria A. Brownworth is a nationally syndicated
columnist. She is a book critic for the Baltimore Sun and
a columnist for Curve magazine. She is the author
and editor of numerous books, including the award-winning Coming
Out of Cancer: Writings
from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic and Too Queer: Essays
from a Radical Life. She used to live in New Orleans.
