I feel like reviving my first efforts on the blogosphere in Negritude. So there are many things that I want to speak on but I will try to keep my rambling as simple as it gets. There are certain things that I can live without. I can live without luxuries. I can also live with out drama. I know that I need hard times to truly appreciate the beauty of the world.
I have had a few recent observations in the outside world, that is that world outside of my head. I wonder about the folks affected by Katrina. I feel a deep connection to them being as expendable as them in this country. I know it is a precarious balance that keeps me afloat. I know that life is a blessing every day, why? because I am still dry. I am not clinging to the side of a roof, or starving and raped in a shelter. I am not a political pawn(this week) and I am not wondering to what far corner of the south my family heirlooms and keepsakes have washed away to. Knowing this and appreciating these lacks as blessings I am still burning with resentment for my sisters and my brothers who were tossed about by god and country and left out to dry.
I have existed in a world where there is an offensive practice of protecting ones exclusivity. I define this as creating criteria for worthy and unworthy and applying it to everyone.
Examples that I can think of include how some women and men can can conclude that a sexual assault is warranted based on the character of the assaulted person. Either explicitly stated or implied I have seen and heard people say things like " Well why was she dressed like that" or "She was arrested once in a sweep, she wasn't charged with prostitution but others around her were..." or "she shouldn't have put herself in that situation". The only person that can stop a sexual assault from happening is the would be perp. The only person to blame in the logical sequence would then be that perp. But if she knew him, or if she ever did anything of sexual or moral ambiguity then she is always held culpable in some way.
Katrina's victims speaking of folks that punk'd without the benefit of spit or vaseline. These folk were more than likely below the poverty line. These folk were mostly black, elderly or otherwise marginalized. The vulnerable due to economic and social reasons in tandem. These are the bulk of the dead and missing. These are the folks for who leaving the rotted city seemed implausible or flat out impossible to ask of a live existing check to check. The choice this country made was to chalk the situaution up to a " you have been warned, fend for your self" This indifference feed this human tragedy to epic proportions. I can see it is that same exclusivity. "these people have made/ are making bad decisions", or "look at them in the midst of disaster all they can do is loot and destroy". "this is a third world nightmare" The caption read on the front page of the daily news and with that it brought images of other for whom humanity lay at the feet of the fittest or most worthy will prosper and the rest will serve in whatever capacity. Whether it it to die on the altar of capitalist ambition or indifference. The president it seems is looking for a way to turn the blame back on the city itself or it denizens to feed the fire of shame at the posibility of having to answer to this blatant disregard for human life.
Of course they will do what they have to do to survive. taking food where they can. Of course they will abandon their humanity in the face of apocalyptic horror. How they are processed by the collective unconcious will be the test of whether this can be allowed again. The president doesn't care about poor black folk. He doesn't care about poor people altogether. The reason he is left to his lack of feeling is that he has convinced this country that their class will grant them exclusive rights to their human dignity. It is the best trick he has played yet. There is a whole lot of people who live in the middle. Middle income middle class but believe they are valued above the lower income and the lower class. The voting power and their buying power but as soon as the flood waters rise to high they of course will be sacrificed just as readily.
Any sort of categorization based on arbitrary marker like race or economic status are built in air and just as flimsy. Yet this feeling of it can't happen to me because I am..rich(relatively), white, and so much better by definition is an illusion. The image of a white couple wading through the NO flood waters draging food from a grocery store next to a caption that read that they "found it" juxtaposed next to the image of a young black person doing the same thing with the caption that read he "looted" the food in his possession. Language frames reality.