UNITED FOR PEACE OF PIERCE COUNTY
"We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy."
Will Hurricane Katrina awaken an America bent on spiritual death?
September 1, 2005
Hurricane Katrina has smashed the
Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Mississippi and devastated the entire city of New
Orleans, delivering in only a few hours a catastrophic blow that it is still
impossible fully to grasp. But one thing is clear. Katrina is a powerful
symbol of the profound disarray of American society. The United States is spending about
$1.25 billion a week on a futile nation-building endeavor in a country the vast
majority of which wants it gone. U.S. leaders have created conditions for an
incipient civil war without possessing any means to contain divisive and hateful
forces of which they have, it seems, no understanding. Only last weekend Sen.
John Warner had the gall to lament: "Our nation has given so much to the Iraqi
people, and what are they giving us in return?" (New York Times, Aug. 29,
2005). Our leaders devise aims that are so
fantastical and unrealizable that many Americans believe there must be some
hidden agenda behind them, even as they neglect the needs of their own people.
On Aug. 30, the day after Katrina tore up the Gulf Coast, the U.S. Census Bureau
reported that the number of Americans living in poverty had increased for the
fourth consecutive year, rising 1.1 million (from 2003) to 37 million, one third
of them children; the number of Americans without health insurance, meanwhile,
increased by 800,000, to 45.8 million (Associated Press, Aug. 30,
2005). Katrina was a powerful wake-up call
about the deliberate character of that neglect. Six thousand members of the
Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard were unable to help when Hurricane
Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississippi because they were in Iraq. Even
more significantly, it turned out that repairs of levees known to be weak had
been delayed because of the war. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily
News wrote on Aug. 30: "The federal government has been working with state
and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and
flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed
six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control
Project, or SELA. . . . After 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward
SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the
spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security coming at
the same time as federal tax cuts was the reason for the strain. At least nine
articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of
Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control
dollars." Sidney Blumenthal wrote on the web
site of Der Spiegel on Aug. 30: "In early 2001, the Federal Emergency
Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans
was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. . . . But by
2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as
it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding
requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for
holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent.
Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding
of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to
impose a hiring freeze." Now the nation will pay the price of this
neglect. Imperial arrogance purblind
militarism blood, treasure, and precious life squandered in the sands of Iraq
neglect of the poor willful disregard of known dangers to our cities and to
the planet itself: Are these symptoms of what Martin Luther King Jr. meant when
he warned: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death"? UNITED FOR
PEACE OF PIERCE COUNTY "We
nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than
cooperative diplomacy."