Friday, March 7, 2008

Parasites and Leeches

I wrote a couple months ago about the view that conservatives think the Katrina response has been appropriate, though from my viewpoint it has been a disaster. Here is confirmation of the conservative's take. This is from Neal Boortz, who said it on his own Neal Boortz Show which is from Cox Radio Syndication. Speaking of the poor people who needed to be rescued after Katrina hit New Orleans, he said:

" That wasn't the cries of the downtrodden; that's the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them. 'It's somebody else's job to get me out of here. It's somebody else's job to save my life. Not mine. Send me a bus, send me a limo, send me a boat, send me a helicopter, send me a taxi, send me something. But you certainly don't expect me to actually work to get myself out of this situation, do you? Haven't you been watching me for generations? I've never done anything to improve my own lot in life. I've never done anything to rescue myself. Why do you expect me to do that now, just because a levee broke?'

And then [John] Edwards [in New Orleans to withdraw from the presidential campaign] said, yeah, it was Washington's problem, it was all Washington's problem, it was all George Bush's fault. You had a city of parasites and leeches, and that's George Bush's fault? So, boy, I need to slow down. I'm saying too many of the things I actually believe today."

As a commentator translates, their poverty makes them undeserving of help. Some people shouldn't survive and their poverty, which means they were unable to get out of the way, identifies them as unfit for survival. Thus helping them is immoral. It is simply nature's way of cleaning up, of clearing the way for more affluent housing and owners.

That same conservative viewpoint has brought us have a spreading AIDS crisis among the poor of Washington DC and a horribly inadequate evacuation plan for our capital that would be needed in the case of a dirty bomb or bioterror attack.

This essay came to my attention through another by the same author. The credit crisis and impending recession is now hitting the middle class. These people were supposed to have a sustaining job and a house. With that one had arrived, one was secure. One was no longer one of "those" people, a parasite and leech like the people in New Orleans. But the bottom has dropped out. Interest rates on the house loan have reset. The house itself is worth less. And layoffs are looming.

And yet, talk in Washington is that some people don't deserve to be rescued from their predicament. They should be left to drown, identified by their lack of economic resources. Their middle class status is smoke and they find they are one of "those" people after all.

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