General Interest > Let's talk about the weather...
Refugee "Cities"
Anonymous:
--- Quote ---On 2005-09-12 07:14:00, Kool-Aid wrote:
"Excuse me, but the proper term is "Americans", not "refugees"."
--- End quote ---
Being one does not preclude being the other. Get over the word games and get on with really helping these people, whatever you want to call them. The fact that W. fiddled while New Orleans drowned is sickening. To get pissed about a word at this time is putting the cart beforew the horse. These people need food, shelter, money, medicine, and jobs, not some ivory-tower PC know it all going into righteously indignant hysterics over what is, in the end, an issue of semantics.
Anonymous:
--- Quote ---On 2005-09-13 15:07:00, Anonymous wrote:
"
--- Quote ---
On 2005-09-12 07:14:00, Kool-Aid wrote:
"Excuse me, but the proper term is "Americans", not "refugees"."
--- End quote ---
Being one does not preclude being the other. Get over the word games and get on with really helping these people, whatever you want to call them. The fact that W. fiddled while New Orleans drowned is sickening. To get pissed about a word at this time is putting the cart beforew the horse. These people need food, shelter, money, medicine, and jobs, not some ivory-tower PC know it all going into righteously indignant hysterics over what is, in the end, an issue of semantics."
--- End quote ---
While the Rwanda/Burundi genocide was going on, the Clinton administration did their best to avoid calling it "genocide", because then they would have been obligated to do something. There is a lot of power in a word. It is disrespectful and ignorant to ignore the fact that the former residents of New Orleans are homeless refugees. In as much as the levee breaking destroyed the city way more than the wind and the rain, and in as much as that was caused by government sloth, classicism and racism, this is indeed a serious situation in the U.S. Of course the government wants to whitewash the whole thing. You don't have to be in an "ivory tower" to see the power of language to shape perception and thereby response.
Anonymous:
Frontline film on the 1994 Rwanda genocide:
http://http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/etc/synopsis.html
There is a bizarre sequence in the film of U.S. bureaucrats and politicians refusing to use the word "genocide".
Anonymous:
I think the government should give everyone who was displaced enough money to secure their own shelter for the next few months as well as food stamps. Our airforce and airlines should also help the displaced people go to areas where they have family or other contacts. The entire nation should be helping with this effort. If every hotel in the nation allowed four or five families to have shelter for a few months people could get back on their own feet. It really could work. Locate people where they desire to be located and then give them a few months shelter and provisions. It really could work. Nearly a billion dollars has been raised by private donors, celebrities, churches and so forth. We really need to all do our part to help in such a situation. It really could happen to anyone, anywhere. A tornado, another hurricane, a flood, a tsunami, an earthquake. None of us are immune to disaster and we really need to have a better plan for one.
Antigen:
Yup, that's pretty much what's working, too. Now, the next step that must come swiftly is to quit paying for the services government is not adept at providing, seein' as how we're finally acknowledging that it can't.
Here's freedom to him who would read;
Here's freedom to him who would write;
None ever feared that the truth should be heard,
But them that the truth would indict.
--author unknown (circa 1914)
--- End quote ---
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