Black Refugees Automatic Criminals

It’s happening yet again.

As I watched both FOX NEWS and CNN between 3–3:15 p. m. EDST on Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, evacuees from Louisiana were walking down the rear ramp of an American Airlines passenger jet at the Lubbock, Texas airport. Awaiting them are well over a hundred uniformed police officers. Not firemen, emt’s or just medical and disaster relief personnel, but what looked like a cop convention on the runway.

The federal government caused these poor people this tragedy by earlier this year cutting the New Orleans District of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers by a whopping and unprecedented $71 million, diverting funds desperately needed for reinforcing the New Orleans levees, to fund the war in Iraq and to fund the useless FEMA, which is spending over a billion dollars on black projects having nothing to do with disaster relief. The federal government is responsible for all the flood deaths in New Orleans. Yet where’s the video news coverage of this by the head-embedded TV media?

The evacuees were being forced to drop their bags at the feet of the police officers, then step back, while a black Labrador police dog sniffed their luggage for contraband. Can you imagine that? After losing everything they had and suffering the trauma of the past week, not knowing if they and their families would survive, they are finally airlifted to Lubbock where they are ‘welcomed’ by dozens of police forcing them to be again searched. While passengers everywhere might have their bags searched for explosives, it is always before boarding the aircraft, not after they step off of it.

Chances are great that if these victims were mostly white, an army of cops would not have been sent to the Lubbock airport, but only the mayor, city council people, aid workers and a brass band.

After I wrote a recent article saying that things have not changed that much in the South from the perspective of the poor black people who were forced to suffer as long as five hours in line in the New Orleans heat and humidity because illegal searches were being performed on them, I received many e-mails of protest saying that the South is not racist any more. It may not be, but the government sure is. Most said how lucky the “ghetto blacks” were to be saved at all by government and should be grateful to submit to any treatment at the hands of police and guardsmen. Yet, right now, while watching TV coverage at the armed camp at the Lubbock airport, there is little room to deny the racism of searching the hurricane victims who are almost all black. There can be no other explanation for searching people getting off of a plane.

Unbelievably, many of the e-mails actually defended the nefarious actions of the government, justifying it because of the bad behavior of the looters. What about the looting by gas stations charging $3 a gallon more than the week before? Most of them were selling gas that they paid for at old prices. You won’t see any black faces on the corporate boards of the giant oil companies who are looting you personally every time you try to fill up your tank.

Why about the looting of funds, supplies and guardsmen? What are the guardsmen of Louisiana and Mississippi doing in Iraq instead of helping the victims inside their own states? The poorest classes that supplied their sons and daughters to ‘defend freedom’ in Iraq are the same who couldn’t even get an unused school bus to carry them to safety. Now most the school buses are under water while the media keeps re-showing footage of people looting food, water, or goods to barter for food and water, which deflects the public’s focus on the government. Apparently it worked with a lot of us.

Who looted the FEMA trucks? The satellite-dish news vans made it to NOLA and Biloxi within 24 hours of the storm, yet FEMA never showed for five days. They claimed it was because “water was covering the roads…,” but news vans made it in almost immediately. Homeland Security and FEMA have billion-dollar operating budgets paid for by the American taxpayer and provide zilch in return. If that isn’t looting the store owners in New Orleans big time, I don’t know what is.

How about the looting of Social Security by Congress for years and years of money never meant for anything but people’s retirement, and now, if you’re under 55 years old, you won’t receive back because of politicians’ looting? How many thousands have you been forced to contribute in automatic paycheck deductions that you’ll never see in your old age because of government looting?

Remember my words when you’re lying neglected in a public rest-home ward some day because you have no Social Security, and all as a result of the fact that you were looted by government all your life. Maybe you’ll recall that people could only focus on a few desperate poor people in New Orleans emulating government. Who did those store-looters think they were back then, Senators!?

The looters left the Superdome because there was almost no food and water available. Since no one would give them information on when they would get out of there or get food, out of desperation they were forced to strike out on their own. It was worse than a Soviet gulag as far as those in the shelter were concerned. This hasn’t been reported, just spin control about rapes and violence by the ungrateful victims of the flood, the flood that was caused by a federal government more interested in Iraqi oil and its self-preservation FEMA police agency, than the lives of American citizens in jeopardy.

Forever in my mind will be a revulsion for the City of Lubbock, Texas. In my considered opinion this local government is still racist. What they did is inexcusable. The mayor and every city council representative should be fired along with their chief of police. What they did at the Lubbock airfield on Sunday, September 4, 2005 will go down as a day in infamy and is a permanent stain on the image of a southern town that pats itself on the back for its enlightenment.

So the South no longer contains prejudice? All we have to do is look to the government, not the people, of Lubbock, Texas. If they are not removed from office, then they truly do only represent white Southerners of means, as many claim.

September 8, 2005

Jack Duggan [send him mail] lives in Fort Apache (Hamilton, New Jersey, site of the anthrax mailings) with his family.

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