Left Behind [View All]

[Plaid Adder]

A long time ago, when I was still in school, a bunch of us were sitting around talking about the devastation from Hurricane Andrew. Someone said something about how it was very dangerous to live in a trailer park, since they were always the first to get flattened whenever something like this happened. A guy I was in school with, who I still see around from time to time, and who I had never had any reason to think ill of, said, with a completely straight face, "I always thought that was God's way of cleaning out the gene pool."

We all stared at him. There was no irony. He really meant it.

Years later, when my partner was a law student working on one of her first cases, she had to ride up in the elevator with the plaintiff and the defendants' lawyer. On the way up, Liza and the plaintiff were talking about the massive heat wave in Chicago, and how the poor elderly who had no air conditioning and were afraid to go outside were dying in it. The company lawyer's comment on this was, "Well, they should be."

The American Family Association's "Agape Press" (agape my ass) has floated the idea that Katrina was actually a blessing, because it purged New Orleans of its wickedness. Specifically, of abortion, gay people, and Mardi Gras.

I was thinking about all this and suddenly it occurred to me: this is how the Christian right has always imagined the end of the world. That's the whole idea of the Rapture: the elect will escape destruction, the reprobate will be left to wallow in it. These are the same people who believe that prosperity is a sign of God's grace. The elect--the white, rich, straight, clean-living, conservative Republicans who hate abortion and love tax cuts--drive their SUVs up to heaven, and the poor, the black, the fallen, are left to drown.

We should remember, when we try to understand what happened here, that there are people in this country who are watching the poor die by the roadside and thinking: Good. Let them die. Now I won't have to pay taxes to keep them on welfare.

And we should remember that these are the people who are most likely to have voted for Bush, who are most likely to have been his cronies, who are most likely to be in positions of power right now. These are the people who hate cities, who think they are cesspools of vice that need to be "purged." These are the people whose dreams are coming true, one nightmare at a time.

:scared:

The Plaid Adder