Just taking some time to think about the many things that we can learn from this terrible event. One of the observations that really struck me was how, in times like these, people in every walk of life are almost forced to see things that we (as a society) usually try to ignore. Eugene Robinson does a good job of elaborating on this in his Washington Post article No Longer Invisible
Excerpt:
NEW ORLEANS — Beside the interstate leading into this abandoned city there’s a self-storage warehouse whose flimsy walls were peeled away by the hurricane. The contents are almost undisturbed, stacked neatly in their exposed compartments. You can see all the inconvenient things that people stowed out of sight and out of mind.
That’s what this unreal disaster did to New Orleans and the whole country. Things we tried to tuck away and forget about are suddenly out there for the world to see. As a nation we can deal with them or not, but we no longer have the option of pretending they don’t exist.
Chief among this inconvenient baggage is poverty. After seeing who escaped the flood and who remained behind, it’s impossible to ignore the shocking breadth of the gap between rich and poor. It’s as if we don’t even see poor people in this country anymore, as if we don’t even try to imagine what their lives are like. Think about what just happened — a record-book hurricane was bearing down on the most vulnerable city in the country, and it didn’t dawn on officials at any level that many people didn’t have cars in which to flee, money to stay in hotels or upstate friends with enough space to take them in.
To be poor in America was to be invisible, but not after this week, not after those images of the bedraggled masses at the Superdome, convention center and airport. No one can claim that the post-Reagan orthodoxy of low taxes and small government, which does wonders for the extremely rich, also inevitably does wonders for the extremely poor.
What was that about a rising tide lifting all boats? What if you don’t have a boat?
Another thing that came to mind was the Roger Waters song “Watching TV“, which reflects on the unique ability of television to shove such issues (in this case the Tienanmen Square massacre) to the forefront of our collective awareness.
In Tienanmen Square, Lost my baby there
My yellow rose, In her bloodstained clothes
She was a short order pastry chef in a Dim Sum dive on the Yangtze tideway
She had a shiny hair, She was a daughter of an engineer
Won’t you shed a tear, for my yellow rose
My yellow rose, in her bloodstained clothes
She had perfect breasts, She had high hopes
She had almond eyes, She had yellow thighs
She was a student of philosophy
………
And she is different from Cro-Magnon man, She’s different from Anne Boleyn
She is different from the Rosenbergs, And from the unknown Jew
She is different from the unknown Nicaraguan, Half superstar half victim
She’s a victor star conceptually new
And she is different from the Dodo, And from the Kankabono
She is different from the Aztec, And from the Cherokee
She’s everybody’s sister; She’s a symbolic of our failure
She’s the one in fifty million who can help us to be free
Because she died on TV
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