This is my second post today. I am full of stress, anxiety. The magnitude of the devastation wrought by Katrina is now impossible for me to manage. My sense is that things are dire, not only for the Gulf, but also for the entire country. We will not sustain $3.45/gallon gas prices for long. That sort of crazy increase in fuel prices is enough to invoke images of Mad Max: fighting for fuel in the most primitive, vicious ways imaginable.
I am no economist. I understand supply, demand, and much of the volatility of markets. I understand that there are fears of shortages, as deliveries of crude oil and other fuels are interrupted. But I also recognize this: there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Gulf Coast Americans right now who are NOT consuming any oil or gas or electricity. No consumption at all, nor shall there be for days, weeks, maybe months. How does that fact affect economic forces?
As for the looters: what the hell is that all about? It's like raiding Fort Knox after the world has ended.
Where, pray tell, do you think you're going with all those sneakers? Are you going to jog through the sodden city streets? And where in a city with no electricity do you think you're going to find takers of those stolen TVs? Do you think stolen jewels are going to help you find clean water?
That one looter was quoted as saying this is the time for the oppressed to get back at their alleged oppressors is purely hellish: It is the sort of statement one might find in a real hell. For the looting is utterly futile. It will bring nothing to the thieves at all, except more oppression. There is no vindication or justice found in stealing goods, especially when the goods are stolen in the midst of a tragedy that smites everyone. It's like stealing a wallet from a dead airline pilot slumped over the controls of an airplane that is blasting full-throttle directly toward the ground. The act is damnable in its futility and indignity. As one reporter put it, the looting has nothing to do with survival. Breaking into a grocery store and distributing bread to neighbors is survival. Rafting stolen golf clubs down streets is complete self-absorption. It reminds me of George Costanza, the Seinfeld character, running from an apartment fire by first knocking down an old lady holding her walker and then pushing children out of the way. Except none of this is funny.
I am struggling with my own sense of futility, not only in what I do here, but what I can do to help my neighbors in the Gulf Coast. I am awash with an existential grief, losing faith that any of this has meaning. I am worried, anxious. There looms a sense of dread. What to do?
The Institute for Public Accuracy (now there's an Orwellian and futile name if I've ever read one), has blamed the New Orleans levee breaks on the Bush administration's expenditures running the Iraq War. Had the money not been spent in Iraq, the levees, apparently, would have been shored up more substantially. Of course, those who think this way are remarkably, uh, obtuse. Since all the monies spent on Iraq come not from some special super-duper bank account but from the operating budget of the United States government, one might cite OTHER expenditures that have siphoned money from New Orleans. One could ask whether Boston's Big Dig was not a disasterous funneling of money away from New Orleans' levee projects. One could also ask whether all that money spent on Medicare or Social Security or alternative energy projects or the hearings regarding stem-cell research could not have been better spent on the Gulf Coast. Perhaps if we didn't spend money on AIDS research or Africa revitalization efforts none of this would be happening right now.
Truly, the idiocy is staggering. And yet, as I said in my post earlier today, I have braced myself for that idiocy. However, I think I am braced rather poorly.
Has anyone heard news of offers of aid from other countries to help America with the loss of a major city? If memory serves me well, a Category IV-V hurricane is more potent than hundreds of hydrogen bombs: the energy of a hurricane is the most powerful force on earth. The Gulf Coast disaster, then, is a nuclear holocaust only with rain and wind and the surge of the sea (waves 47-feet high measured by buoys in the Gulf). Do you think there is to be any help from Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro when the sun rises?
Contratimes
©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
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