Exiles from a city and from a nation -- cornel west

Exiles from a city and from a nation

Cornel West
Sunday September 11, 2005
The Observer


It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.
What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane.
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what went wrong -- summary of major news article

today's papers
What Went Wrong
By Lea Rappaport Geller
Posted Sunday, Sept. 11, 2005, at 3:42 AM PT

The New York Times and Washington Post lead, and the Los Angeles Times off-leads, with detailed post mortems of the mishandling of Katrina. All papers are commemorating Sept. 11 by critiquing the government agency created in its wake. Even though the Department of Homeland Security was set up to address blunders in the federal government's response to the terrorist attacks, allowing it to "face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force," Katrina revealed a giant hole in the department's national response plan.
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Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126097/