Cody
Williams
Focusing on What Matters
in a Time of Crisis
Fashion week in New York went on as planned this year. Floral patterns in somber tones seem to be the new in. Bright pinks and yellows are on the way out.
Meanwhile, a recently released Al Qaeda tape may just have signaled to a world network of lunatic wannabe terrorists that Los Angeles has been marked as the target of choice, the next place to unleash mayhem, death and destruction.
And someone just revealed to me that mercenaries of fortune, the Blackwater Security firm, has been unleashed, armed and dangerous, to roam the deserted streets of a flooded out New Orleans. (Blackwater is the private armed guards being used in Iraq and Afghanistan to keep Islamic insurgents in check)
Another friend, who happens to be African-American, recently remarked that New Orleans, rid of its weak, poor and nary-do-wells, can rebuild and be a 'better' city. Barbara Bush’s ‘let them eat cake’ foot in month espousal stating that displaced ‘Nawlinians’ now have an opportunity for personal improvement in Texas and elsewhere negates the importance of home, family, history, culture, community and tradition.
Some entrepreneurs are chomping at the bit to get a hold of the billions of dollars the government will spend to rebuild the large city that probably never should have been a city in the first place: a below sea level Gulf Coast port town positioned between a large lake and the mighty Mississippi River, waters kept at bay by a patchwork of manmade dikes and levies. A surprising number of whites have shown more concern about the buildings in the French Quarter and the ‘tony’ homes in the city’s Garden District than they have for the humans who lived in the 9th Ward, the black and poor.
Listening to some of the displaced blacks talking on TV during this crisis I was amazed at how untouched they seemed to be by the world I've come to know and live in. Some seemed even to speak a different language, a patois. Would we all be more comfortable if they were more like us: articulate, educated and seeking middleclass? Can we see them as being okay just as they are?
I don't know why Blackwater is in New Orleans. This can be very troubling if they choose a shoot first and ask questions later mentality. My hope and my guess is they are there to make money. Pure and simple. The pursuit of the buck, not a whole lot unlike those looters after the storm seeking material gain.
I hear a lot of references to US slavery, Reconstruction and the 1865 dispersing of ex-slaves when folks talk of the New Orleans Katrina destroyed. The debates going on now must sound a lot like talks that went on after emancipation: what will we do with ‘them;’ where will ‘they’ live?
We, as a nation and as a people, can be made better from this experience. Or we can miss some great opportunities for renewal and growth.
The choices are ours.
Are we going to get stuck in meaningless squabbles about the use of the word refugee? Is that a distraction, or is it important? Is labeling Bush any more of a racist than anyone else who's held that job a distraction, or is it useful?
Conservative columnist George Will found in the devastation of Katrina the opportunity to write, “Given … that 76 percent of all births to Louisiana African Americans were to unmarried women, it is a safe surmise that more than 80 percent of African American births in inner-city New Orleans -- as in some other inner cities -- were to women without husbands.”
I’m sure the rising of the Sun, the change of seasons or milk curdling inspires him to find fault in the life styles of African Americans.
Black intellectual Cornel West sees this as yet another reason to remind us of his academic achievements. He writes, “The rural blues, the urban jazz. It is the tragi-comic lyricism that gives you the courage to get through the darkest storm… If I had been of Martin Luther King's generation I would never have gone to Harvard or Princeton…Condoleezza Rice has sold her soul.”
And?
Tell me how any of this is going to feed someone, educate someone, house a family or two in need.
Habitat for Humanity is sure to be in the new New Orleans erecting homes for the poor. How many of us will be with them? Will we insist that the poor not be placed back in the basin’s lowest points? Are we helping churches and community organizations devise workable disaster survival plans that promote qualified leaders and authority that will prevent us from reverting to looting and animalistic lawlessness that terrorized many of our people during the most desperate hours after Katrina hit?
Or will we leave getting those in need back on their feet up to others while we debate the use of word refugee, if George Bush cares about black people, inner city teenage pregnancy rates, Condoleezza’s soulfulness?
Now let’s turn our attention back to the super models on New York’s catwalks. Diddy (drop the P, thank you) throws the best parties. All of Hollywood wants to attend.
© 2005 Cody Williams www.codywilliams.com
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