But, do let's look beyond color. Suddenly the nation finds itself with some half million Americans displaced from one of the poorest areas in the nation. Now, not all of the affected are poor, nor black. But, it will be the poor, regardless of any other characteristic, who will find themselves at the whim of the tides of mercy drifting wherever the current takes them. Now, regional population demographics suggest, they will be black on the order of nearly 70%.
Although they called the area home, most residents of New Orleans Seventh Ward were not there by choice, any more than any family would choose to live in Chicago's Horner District or New York's Bedford Styverson. Conditions had conspired to create a socio-political environment which kept generations effectively incarcerated by their own misconceptions, and the bigotry and misdirected altruism of their immediate benefactors.
Katrina destroyed those fences in addition to everything else. Suddenly, enormous numbers of people will be introduced to communities like Portland, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Seattle, Columbus, Austin, Madison; communities that don't reflect them in any number of ways from food to weather and yes even color.
Frightened, displaced, and confused at first, do you know what they will find? That Mormons are fine, fair, thoughful people. That German farmers of both Ohio and Texas found slavery to be deplorable. That the Pacific Northwest is as beautiful and inviting as it is wet. That Americans in general are really as color blind as they are charitable. And they will find that success exists for anyone willing to dismiss their own personal misconceptions and embrace the opportunity.
And many will find no reason to return to the squalor of Jackson, Sharpton, and Dean's Urban Concentration Camps... or the shackles and whips of entitlement.
An email is travelling around the office today with the subject line FW: Bush doesn't care about black people.
Well, here is a revelation. I don't care about black people either. I could really care less about the color of a man's skin as long as the content of his character renders virtue.
Martin Luther King Jr. agreed.
Ping!
She is proposing that black people should be relocated to another southern urban ghetto? Well, I guess there are plenty of those to choose from.
I know that the Mayor of DC sent 10 buses down to NO and couldn't get any volunteers to relocate up here to the highest cost of living and lowest quality and most racially segregated school system in America. Even the destitute have standards.
Even so, the Mayor of DC got his hands on 300 souls who were loaded on an airplane without being told where they were going. How patronizing is that? One passenger tried to commit suicide on the way up North.
So DC finally got 300 involuntary NO evacuees, herded them into the National Guard armory (home sweet home), DC was declared a "federal disaster area" as a result, and the Mayor immediately got SIX MILLION DOLLARS in federal disaster aid. Do the math, per evacuee.
I believe as of this morning less than 150 of these evacuated souls, traded among the big city poverty pimps for a slice of federal disaster aid funds, still remain in the benevolent custody of the Mayor of DC...the rest having located an underground railroad and got the heck out of another urban poverty plantation