[altroots] Re: Jose Torres Tama "The Armies of Compassion were AWOL in New Orlean s aftre Katrina"

Amigos, I can only write to explore the madness that we are still bearing 
witness to today in the aftermath of Katrina. Two weeks ago, I managed to 
escape the chaos of New Orleans, and it is my duty as an artist and writer who 
loves this city to present my analysis of an endemic disease in this society 
that was exemplified in the inaction of federal support. Below is the latest 
piece. Please circulate! ---JTT
The "Armies of Compassion" were AWOL in New Orleans after Katrina
I keep hearing about these "armies of compassion," and while I was sequestered 
by the chaos of New Orleans--trapped in a perverse social experiment called 
Katrina?s aftermath--these armies were absent without leave. AWOL! Where were 
they while my beloved bayou city descended into an even greater terror than the 
physical damage that Hurricane Katrina spawned with her fury of water and wind? 
Their absence exemplified-the criminal incompetence of local, state and 
national FEMA officials--who actually prevented private citizens and 
organizations from delivering urgent aid without their "official" bureaucratic 
rescue stamp. This prevention strategy still continues even now on day 
seventeen after the storm because FEMA can only seem to flex its ineffectual 
muscles that are trained in practicing a military strategy in coping with 
disaster rather than a more humane effort of support for those who are left 
with nothing. 
While we have been privy to TV staged efforts of FEMA?s aid and the photo 
opportunities of Bush hugging evacuated African American children, many 
accounts demonstrate that their "armies of compassion" seem astute in the act 
of disappearance after the cameras are gone or are rarely to be found on the 
fields of the disaster. Such was the case on the third day after Katrina had 
passed and the social storm in New Orleans was increasing in strength, and it 
became more evident to me that the armies of compassion, still "missing in 
action," were part of a political strategy to punish this Southern port city in 
the hemispheric Americas because it recently voted itself the color "blue" in a 
"red" state? As such, I could only envision a Christian maniacal executive 
chief whipping New Orleans into submission like so many African slaves were 
whipped by similar bible-toting masters only a century and half ago? Let?s not 
forget that previous "armies of compassion" have been used to protect
  slave-holding patrons and hold hostage their booty of dark-skinned property 
in a disturbing history that is not too far removed from this post-modern 
disaster. 
In a city of ghosts like New Orleans, the past is always present, and I do not 
suffer from the cultural amnesia that often prevails in this channel-surfing 
consumer society. I know too well that this nation has an extensive resume of 
denying its citizenry of color due justice and protection under a set of laws 
which have been historically applied with a biased gavel. From one century to 
another, I have seen little difference and only forty years ago similar "armies 
of compassion" were denying African Americans the right to assemble in the 
South and trying to suffocate the civil rights movement as much as they were 
denying proper voting rights and humane working conditions to Mexican American 
farm workers in California and engaged in acts of predicated murder to stop the 
American Indian movement. Welcome to brief history of abuse in America. 
I see a similar indifference in Katrina?s wake and the inaction by FEMA and the 
current heads of state is just a sinister and calculated as other such 
atrocities committed against people of color. Where do I begin---the "trail of 
tears" against native Americans, the Zoot Zoot riots against Mexicans in Los 
Angeles, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the planned 
acts of arson against the Latino community in the Hoboken fires of the 80?s 
that displaced thousands for real-estate developments of the waterfront? Oh, 
give me a decade in this history, and I can point to an atrocity for your 
palette. If we are to have any justice for the future of this multiracial 
experiment called the United States, then heads should be rolling in the same 
bloodbath that these neo-cons have created in the remaining flood waters of New 
Orleans. 
And lets? hear it for the Bush matriarch who aptly deserves the "Marie 
Antoinette Award" for calling the displaced evacuees at the Houston shelter as 
being better of because, "you know, (they) were underprivileged anyway, so this 
is working very well for them." What clearer evidence that this Bush family is 
completely without the faintest of clues when face to face with the poor--the 
other face of America that they have been shielded from in their veil of 
supreme wealth that everyday is soaked with more and more blood on the surface 
of the oil that feeds them. Is this her "conservative compassion" on display in 
unadulterated black and white?
And the "chosen" TV images that sculpt such a believable profile of a culture 
in electric short hand criminalized African Americans even further than the 
norm because we all now that it is quite common, even without Katrina, to be a 
suspect in this country just by being black and/or Latino, Hatian and Middle 
Eastern. Repeatedly, we were treated to images that created an even greater 
fear of African Americans in a city with a rich legacy of civil rights efforts 
and a black intelligentsia, premiere Jazz musicians, writers and artists, 
cultural workers and educators. But the media circus loops running over and 
over displayed images in which black people were either wanton looters or 
victims and mostly poor. We did not see the valiant effort of African Americans 
like the middle-aged woman whom I saw at the edge of Esplanade, in the 
residential end of the Quarter, trying desperately to secure safe passage out 
of the chaos for her eighty-year old mother. In my short exchange with h
 er, she mentioned how she was being immediately sized-up as a "potential 
looter" herself, and it was difficult to get assistance and even check into a 
Hotel for some safety. No, you did not see this face of a concerned daughter 
trying to the right thing, and certainly the "invisible armies of compassion" 
were not there to usher her and her mother to safety.
Never was any of this looting footage prefaced by a proclamation that what 
makes New Orleans attractive to the country and to world over is owed to its 
people of color?its African heritage that has built this city with the spilling 
of enslaved blood and that even under such abhorrent conditions these oppressed 
people transformed their pain into art and music and culture that is revered 
internationally. Of course not, how can we expect such historical debt to be 
paid to people of color on prime time TV and cable stations that are the most 
effective tools for the propagation of white supremacy? I know it scares you 
when I say "white supremacy" because it is most evident of the darkest of civil 
secrets in this divided society and there were no "armies of compassion" that 
countered this belief in the aid of the poor and abandoned. 
This city that knows its respect for the ancients deserved an organized effort 
of heart and efficiency of humanity and true compassion. I remain deeply 
disturbed, perplexed and outraged as to how this great empire of capital and 
industry could not manage to organize its technology to mount a proper rescue 
for the most precious pueblo in its possession. By what method of madness and 
political design did the "armies of compassion" arrive a working week late when 
the city was already festering like an untreated wound in the August heat and 
people were dying in the plain view of national TV coverage and angered news 
reporters? Only, now, can I say that finally in the face of such tragedy it 
looks like the press in this country has regained its backbone?its cojones--its 
courage to put a camera on the difficult truths of a continuing legacy of 
abandonment! 
What do I offer as a modest proposal, retribution or solution to these crimes? 
I call for more than FEMA?s Brown and his resignation and put the blood of 
these people on boy George?s hands and the arrogance of his family privilege. 
Because this is not a time for us to be cowards and hold out tongues in silence 
for fear of sounding unpatriotic, because if we have any freedoms left in this 
Union and we are to deserve them as a free nation, then, we need to exercise 
these inalienable rights right now and hold accountable a government that has 
played us with its recklessness and indifference to working people and the 
poor. 
This is a rogue administration whose pomposity is killing more of its 
citizenry, and if we remain with our tongues in our hands, then we deserve the 
fascist posturing it continues to flaunt while disguising itself as a 
"compassionate conservative" regime that calls for a "day of prayer" in the 
wake of its murderous bureaucracy. I will exhibit the same lack of FEMA 
compassion that dragged across the flooded streets of New Orleans and managed 
to turn it into Baghdad in four days while it has taken three years to take 
that country and turn into another "red" mess before the eyes of the world. If 
only the armies of compassion could have been that efficient.
----Jose Torres Tama
in exile from New Orleans in Gainesville, Florida
cell # 504-232-2968
e-mail jose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx or poetafiego@xxxxxxxx

Other related posts: