Katrina exposes hollowness of the American dream to World

Flood horrors the US can't hide

Monday September 5, 2005
The Guardian

Perhaps now, following the disaster on the Gulf coast, the people of the US will wake up to the fact the current administration is not and never has been primarily concerned with the welfare of its citizens (Criticism of Bush mounts, September 3). Our federal government is more interested in pursuing a flawed policy in the Middle East than in allocating the funds necessary to protect our cities. As always, it is the poor that suffer. The funds that could have been used to prevent the flooding of New Orleans have been absorbed in tax cuts for the rich and weapons for Iraq.

Article continues
But while the government can suppress images of US citizens returning in coffins from Iraq, it cannot hide from the world's eyes the horror of bodies floating in the swamp that is now New Orleans.
David Mann
Santa Barbara, California

To put things in perspective, England, Scotland and Wales encompass a total of 88,745sq miles. The area of total devastation along the Gulf coast exceeds 90,000sq miles.

As I write, news crews are on interstate 10 in New Orleans, filming a large apartment building, 200 feet from them, filled with people and surrounded by 20 feet of water, as it burns. No one can get to them. Many other buildings are certain to burn as well. This is but a single incident in a living nightmare covering an area larger than Great Britain. Local, state and federal resources are totally overwhelmed by the magnitude of it.
Rev Charles Stanley
Hertford, North Carolina

I watch in utter amazement at the response to the hurricane disaster in New Orleans. I see reporters able to drive in and out, so why can't they get a fleet of thousands of buses to at least get the people out? If I had known the response was going to be this slow, I would have grabbed a bus and driven out there and started hauling people out myself.

I'm sorry Bush had to cut his vacation short. But at least he got past war protester mom Cindy Sheehan without getting noticed. I'm really angry.
Marc Perkel
San Francisco

Polly Toynbee's article (Breathless charioteer, September 2) is not without relevance to the breakdown of society in New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane. The US may be the most powerful and rich country in the world, but it is also among the most unequal. There is little sense of solidarity between its rich and poor citizens. When disaster strikes, it is each person for him or herself.

An African-American friend in Baton Rouge, a woman struggling valiantly against the drugs and crime devastating her family, told me she had never had a conversation with any white person before, other than receiving an order or a command. Social justice may no longer be fashionable, but it is what holds good societies together.
Shirley Williams
House of Lords

Hurricane Katrina is a terrible tragedy. But it's a very American tragedy. The government instruction to "get out if you can" would surely be seen as an abdication of responsibility anywhere else. It left the poor, the weak and the disabled to face the full force of the storm.

Contrast this with the much poorer nation of Cuba and Hurricane Dennis, just two months ago. Faced with the same warning, and with few Cubans having their cars, they moved over a million people out of its path. Just 10 people died. Surely the US should ask itself why a nation as rich as it is can provide so little for the poor among its people.
Henry Stewart
London

This time last year, the US Gulf states experienced the worst series of storms in over a century. With six weeks of this hurricane season remaining, and with Gulf water surface temperatures 2 degrees C higher than previously recorded, New Orleans is devastated by the most destructive hurricane in US history. Is global warming more immediately relevant to Americans than the Bush administration likes to pretend?
Dr Richard Sallie
Perth, Australia

So now we know what floods, a hike in the oil price, social inequality, and a state that's given up on looking after its citizens looks like. As stocks of fossil fuels decline, global warming takes a grip, the gap between rich and poor increases, and the private sector takes over more and more of the state's responsibilities, isn't it now obvious that fossil-fuelled neoliberalism has had its day?
Prof Andrew Dobson
Open University

Two thoughts occur: that systemic negligence causing death and suffering on a grand scale merits presidential impeachment rather more than does sex in the office; and that a fundamentalist Christian, contemptuous of scientific evidence, might respond to a sign from God.
Edward Pearce
Thormanby, Yorks

Donald Rumsfeld declared the looting in Iraq following "liberation" to be the consequence of "the pent-up feelings that result from decades of oppression". We await his wisdom on New Orleans.
Chris Mazeika
London

Shame on the world's only superpower that it seems not to have planned for, nor to have the ability, to help its poor in this natural disaster.
Margaret Fawcett
London

Katrina exposes the hollowness of the American dream.
RMJ Harvey-Ame








"I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American.... No I'm not an American, I'm one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.... I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of a victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare."