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Daily Social Issues
August 31, 2008
Should Hurricane Gustav touch down in New Orleans and in the neighboring states around the Gulf of Mexico, it is sure to re-open the racial and socio-economic wounds exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina only three years ago. Are we ready?
What should we expect of the National Guard and FEMA? Were all of the dollars allotted to disaster relief well spent on solid infrastructure and levies? Will they hold?
The arrival of Gustav stirs up so many overlapping anxieties during a year where we are particularly anxious as a country, I am sweating bullets just thinking about it. The images of a devastated 9th ward in New Orleans, combined with the faces of poor Blacks and some Whites who struggled to survive in Katrina's wake are still extremely crisp in the minds of Americans. Now, here comes Gustav.
Two large issues seem to intersect here: the concentration (segregation) of poor Blacks into a historically ignored and devastated part of the US that just doesn't seem to be getting any better; and, the clear intensification of a pattern of warming off the Gulf Coast. Both of these massive concerns speak to the reality that climate change, or global warming, affects the impoverished the most, at first anyway. This reality suggests that as the Earth and its oceans warm, those people forced into the harshest regions of the US, and the world, for that matter, will suffer the most.
Climate change and global warming are paramount issues with economic implications that our country cannot bear, particularly at this critical time. Can our nation afford to continuously re-build this part of the country? How much are our economic, social and environmental policies to blame for this recurring nightmare?
