A lot of folks in the conservative media are wondering where the President has been while Nashville suffered through a major disaster last week.
Mr. Obama was quick to send aid to Haiti and to claim that the government is doing all it can to force BP to clean up the Gulf oil spill. Yet a once in a century flood has devastated Nashville, and it doesn't seem to be prominently featured on his radar screen. Some cynics think that the reason the man who was quick to criticize President Bush for waiting a day or two too long to rush aid to New Orleans has been dilatory on Tennessee is because Tennessee is a red state and not likely to vote Democratic. I don't know if that's true, but I hope it's not. I don't like to think that our president is that small-minded and vindictive. Such a motive would, moreover, be counterproductive for the president since administrative indifference is a good way to insure that Tennessee never votes Democratic.
I think, though, that the reason for the lack of apparent concern for the people of Tennessee in the administration and the media may be something that is at once less political and more subconsciously sinister. Perhaps, as with the Mississippi river floods a couple of years ago, people just assume that the victims in these regions don't need government help to cope, that they're a self-reliant, proud breed capable of taking care of themselves, which may well be true. But if this is what's in the back of the minds of administration officials what does that say about their attitude, no doubt subliminal, toward the victims in New Orleans and elsewhere as a result of Katrina? Were those people helpless to do anything to help themselves? Why, with fleets of school busses available couldn't the local authorities evacuate their people? Why couldn't the citizens of the city provide care for each other? Were they so lacking in initiative, so dependent on the federal government, that they just sat around in their City Hall offices and their houses waiting for the government to come in and rescue them?
If that's so, then we need to ask why it is so. Is it because the New Orleans victims were poor, or is it because they've been behaviorally conditioned by a paternalistic welfare state to accept a permanent lassitude, indolence and child-like dependency that the proud people of Nashville and elsewhere disdain? Just wondering.
RLC
