08 September 2005

A Race Deferred

This excellent article in last Sunday's New York Times neatly encapsulates everything I've been thinking since last week about Hurricane Katrina's aftermath in New Orleans. The shock has dissipated, but the cold fury remains. I wish I could say I was surprised that such things could happen in the wealthiest and best-resourced country on the planet. But to have had it so brutally exposed by the media, every day last week, was almost unbearable.

I want to hope that the events of last week might shake some people out of their social complacency, but I fear that as time passes, people who should have learned lessons from what happened in New Orleans will once again slip into comfortable amnesia. Depressing stuff.

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