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| America Is in the Hurt: Revisiting Hurricane Katrina |
"America Is in the Hurt" Series (Part 3)
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Today, June 1, 2007, is the start of the 2007 Hurricane Season. The Associated Press reported that "Tropical Storm Barry formed in the Gulf of Mexico today — the first day of hurricane season — and the National Hurricane Center issued a tropical storm warning for a stretch of Florida’s western coast." Perhaps today is an opportune time to revisit the 2005 tragedy that was Hurricane Katrina.
Hurricane Katrina raised also some old nagging questions that continue to haunt and hurt Americans, especially the colored people and those that value the rights of the unborn citizens of this great country.
· Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter wrote an article, “How to Save the Big Easy,” (Newsweek’s Sept. 12, 2005, special issue about Hurricane Katrina). o Mr. Alter wrote: QUOTE. <<Snipped>> On the other side are blacks—well over half the city's population—who are fed up with a power structure that could not keep them alive, much less house and educate them. Whites and blacks in New Orleans were swimming in a fetid swamp of racial tensions long before Katrina showed up. UNQUOTE.
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To read in its entirety Mr. Alter's column, please make a click at this hyperlink How to Save the Big Easy - Newsweek Hurricane Katrina Coverage - MSNBC.com or copy and paste to your browser http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9190577/site/newsweek/
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I wrote two articles in February 2004 about “America Is in the Hurt.” (My literary guru, Poet-pundit Fred Burce Bunao, suggested the title of this series -- obviously a pun of Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart.)
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The first essay was about racial prejudice like the “fetid swamp of racial tensions” in New Orleans, as Mr. Alter has described. To read it, please make a click at this hyperlink PinoyOnBoard.com - America is in the Hurt (Part One) or copy and paste to your browser http://www.pinoyonboard.com/2004/0209_america.html
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- Chicago Tribune’s columnist Clarence Page wrote also about the race issue in the New Orleans’ hurricane-caused tragedy. Mr. Page said in his recent column: “Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is right. In their mad dash to win coveted, middle-class and mostly white suburban swing voters, both parties have pushed issues of race and poverty offstage in recent presidential contests, especially since the welfare reform law of 1996. New Orleans made America’s invisible poor visible again, and most Americans did not like what they saw. It is there, in our shared disgust over this tragic abandonment of the most needy in our own country, that we might find a new politics—a coalition of the poorly served—if we can find the right leaders.”
- To read Mr. Page’s whole column, please make a click at this hyperlink Chicago Tribune | We're still 2 nations, after all these years or copy and paste to your browser http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0509140007sep14,1,3074374.column?coll=chi-news-col&ctrack=1&cset=true (Editor's Note: This link is no longer available in the Chicago Tribune web site.)
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- The Los Angeles Times reported that “hundreds of dogs and cats left stranded by Hurricane Katrina are being flown by chartered commercial jets to shelters and homes in California by wealthy donors, including a dog-loving Texas oil billionaire and his wife. The airlifts – each costing about $45,000 – were sponsored by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens and his wife, Madeleine, part of a larger effort by animal welfare groups to find homes across the country for animals in crowded shelters in Louisiana and Mississippi.”
- To read the Los Angeles Times article, as written by Richard Marosi and Donna Horowitz, please make a click to this hyperlink A Bone, a Bath and a Window Seat - Los Angeles Times or copy and paste to your browser http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-petlift15sep15,1,2420299.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true (Editor's Note: The Los Angeles Times' link no longer can be accessed.)
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I wrote in Part II of “America Is in the Hurt” that Americans have a soft heart for endangered animals but many of them do not care a bit about endangered fetuses that are routinely aborted.
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To read my essay on this “Great American Holocaust,” please make a click at this hyperlink PinoyOnBoard.com - America’s In the Hurt (Part Two) or copy and paste to your browser http://www.pinoyonboard.com/2004/0212_america.html
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Need I say more about “America Is in the Hurt”?
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(To be continued . . . Editor's Notes: Excerpts from the three articles about "America Is in the Hurt" were published online and in hardcopy editions of the Filipino Image Magazine of Washington, DC, the Fil-Am Weekly MegaScene of Chicago, the Forum Asia magazine of Los Angeles and of course, the www.PinoyOnBoard.com of New York.)
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