An Analysis of Human Waste

Well, hopefully this will be my first political post regarding the Katrina disaster, but it's 5 a.m. so I promise nothing. I'm actually not dedicating my first political post to the slow federal response or to the race/ poverty issue (though it shall be discussed, in due time). Instead, I'd like to analyze the human waste and excrement that has come in the wake of the hurricane, specifically in the form of Rick Santorum and Dennis Hastert. No, my friends, these are not human beings-- these two "men" are actually piles of human waste and excrement, and a pitiful waste of it at that.

We'll start with everyone's favorite, Santorum. (How the flying FUCK does this guy keep getting elected? Who are his fucking Pennsylvania constituents, anyway??) There's a lovely list at RADAR Online of the worst and even worse than that quotes from the hurricane coverage, and it's from there that I get my Santorum quote.

“I mean, you have people who don’t heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out.”—Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

Now, we all saw the footage of the people-- U.S. citizens-- starving to death, wading through disease-riden water, with no shelter, no medical attention, no safety net for up to 5 days. But sometimes it's hard for a pile of human excrement like Rick Santorum to actually digest that stuff.

Let me give you my background of how I, a middle-class, priviledged white female law student, was able to evacuate New Orleans on the Saturday before the storm hit on Monday.

In April of 2000 my parents bought a nearly brand-new Toyota Corolla for my dad to drive. At the time, I was driving my dad's "old" car, a 1992 Toyota Camry. Then one day within the next year, the Camry broke down on me and my dad was afraid to have his only child, his precious girl, drive this scary, unreliable "piece of shit". So even though I was a college student and had never worked out of necessity (my jobs were always to earn extra "spending money") I inherited a 2000 Toyota Corolla.

So we can now fast-forward to the Saturday morning before the hurricane hit. I was all cozy in my New Orleans apartment, and I got a call from my parents with the obligatory, "Oh my god, this is the Big One, we have to evacuate or we'll all die" statement, and guess what I did? I got in my Corolla and drove to my parents' house, from where we then evacuated to Jackson on Sunday.

Now let's analyze what that Saturday and Sunday were like for the upwards of 200,000 low-income residents of New Orleans. It's never been a secret that almost none of the impoverished people in N.O. have cars, despite the fact that our public transportation is abysmal. The local, state, and FEDERAL governments knew this. Their main modes of transportation included buses and more infrequently, trains. But what happend on Saturday afternoon after Mayor Nagin declared a mandatory evacuation? Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains cancelled all their impending services out of town. Huh. That's not even taking into account the fact that most of the people wouldn't have had the money to pay for the fare in the first place. Now, Mr. Santorum, I know you can drop $100 on a glass of wine (it costs a lot to inebriate a pile of human excrement like yourself), but for many of these families, $100 is all they might have per month or even every other month to feed their whole families. And I doubt that many of these victims of Hurricane Katrina had started a savings fund for this particular rainy day, given that the Census Bureau shows that one of the hardest hit areas of New Orleans had an average yearly household income of $7500.

It would have been possible for you to blame the local, state AND federal governments (in the form of FEMA), but since you're a Republican and every single Republican voted against having an independent investigation into what went wrong, then you have no fucking right to complain or place the blame, at least on anyone but your incompetent dumbass self.

So WHO exactly, Mr. Santorum, are you wanting to arrest for staying behind and not evacuating? The single mom with five kids making $7500 a year? The elderly couple living solely of their Social Security checks? The people dying on makeshift ventilators at Charity Hospital when the power went out? Oh, those wretched people, they should certainly be in prison, while I, who was lucky enough to be born to the right people with the right amount of money, should not be in prison because I had a car.

For God's sake, you sick bastard, do us all a favor and take the next space shuttle mission on a one-way trip off this planet and stay gone forever. There's enough piles of shit on this planet already, we don't need your sorry ass taking up any more of our precious space.

I'll talk about Dennis Hastert another time. This post alone has me sick.