Katrina taught us nothing after all.
Racial Polarization is as damning today as it was in the murky and glim aftermath of the worst natural catastrophe this country has ever witnessed.
We sat there in front of our televisions and ate all that the media fed us in picture and words and sounds in absolute horror and disbelief and with such an embarrassment that many folks had to turn the channel in a symbolic gesture akin to pushing away from the table as if we were saying we had seen and heard and had enough, as if things were going to be different from that point on.
All this madness cooked in poverty, fricasseed in incompetence, dooming geography and simmered in apathy for so long by a government that had long since stopped caring even before the Hurricane came but centered in race this story was fed to us 24 hours a day without end for the week of this Bayou tragedy and for a few months there after as if they were leftovers from the main feast just in case we hadn't had our fill of this disgusting truth concerning inequality the first go round. But somehow, someway the American body lacked the proper functioning organs to have digested all that we took in in late 2005 as once again our appetites for this kind of racial polarization rages on only this time it stares at us in the form of the inability of some in the Democratic Party (which slowly but surely is becoming the Demographic Party day to day, state to state) to accept the likely nominee and afford him all the support and political machinery that would otherwise be thrust upon him going into a sure to be hotly contested fierce upcoming general campaign.
If not race, then what major policy difference could there possibly be between two Democratic candidates whose ivy league backgrounds and stances are so similar on so many issues, that could lead many of one candidate's supporters to favor John McCain over Barack Obama in an election that could inexorably alter the fate of a generation as the balance of the Supreme Court, the future of our standing abroad and the need for new, more carefully thought out approaches to issues that we've been caught giving wrong answers to time and time again over the past decade all hang above us?
This is petty even by petty's standards. Because somebody doesn't physically look like me I won't support them and instead will toss my support behind someone whose politics doesn't look like me. Because that's what matters, fluff, not substance.
It's sad. It shows a real ignorance that damns rather than redeems at a time when redemption ought to be embraced rather than rejected.
People are moving en mass to the polls with a renewed since of vigor for the first time in a generation as politics is becoming a sport the nation has enthralled itself in. If these same new people are bringing with them the same old prejudices to the democratic process then never mind the new fervor and excitement the media purports they're bringing in I would just as much prefer they stayed apathetic towards the whole process as they were back in 2000.
Racial Polarization is as damning today as it was in the murky and glim aftermath of the worst natural catastrophe this country has ever witnessed.
We sat there in front of our televisions and ate all that the media fed us in picture and words and sounds in absolute horror and disbelief and with such an embarrassment that many folks had to turn the channel in a symbolic gesture akin to pushing away from the table as if we were saying we had seen and heard and had enough, as if things were going to be different from that point on.
All this madness cooked in poverty, fricasseed in incompetence, dooming geography and simmered in apathy for so long by a government that had long since stopped caring even before the Hurricane came but centered in race this story was fed to us 24 hours a day without end for the week of this Bayou tragedy and for a few months there after as if they were leftovers from the main feast just in case we hadn't had our fill of this disgusting truth concerning inequality the first go round. But somehow, someway the American body lacked the proper functioning organs to have digested all that we took in in late 2005 as once again our appetites for this kind of racial polarization rages on only this time it stares at us in the form of the inability of some in the Democratic Party (which slowly but surely is becoming the Demographic Party day to day, state to state) to accept the likely nominee and afford him all the support and political machinery that would otherwise be thrust upon him going into a sure to be hotly contested fierce upcoming general campaign.
If not race, then what major policy difference could there possibly be between two Democratic candidates whose ivy league backgrounds and stances are so similar on so many issues, that could lead many of one candidate's supporters to favor John McCain over Barack Obama in an election that could inexorably alter the fate of a generation as the balance of the Supreme Court, the future of our standing abroad and the need for new, more carefully thought out approaches to issues that we've been caught giving wrong answers to time and time again over the past decade all hang above us?
This is petty even by petty's standards. Because somebody doesn't physically look like me I won't support them and instead will toss my support behind someone whose politics doesn't look like me. Because that's what matters, fluff, not substance.
It's sad. It shows a real ignorance that damns rather than redeems at a time when redemption ought to be embraced rather than rejected.
People are moving en mass to the polls with a renewed since of vigor for the first time in a generation as politics is becoming a sport the nation has enthralled itself in. If these same new people are bringing with them the same old prejudices to the democratic process then never mind the new fervor and excitement the media purports they're bringing in I would just as much prefer they stayed apathetic towards the whole process as they were back in 2000.
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