The Washington Informer: Opinions/Editorials

“The (British) Crown says Attucks was leading a terrorist mob against the troops, who responded appropriately. Parliament vows to deal with the terrorist threat.”

The humorous treatment gives new meaning to the adage: “One person’s Freedom Fighter is another person’s terrorist.”

And so it goes. An airplane crashes, 50 people are killed. The crash is caused by pilot error, taxiing down the wrong runway. It’s considered a tragic mistake.

An airplane crashes, 50 people are killed. The crash is caused by a bomb in a piece of checked baggage. It’s a terrorist incident. Someone has got to pay, now!

While there is no comparison between the intentional destruction of an airplane full of innocent civilians with an all-too-common tragic, human error, my point is that how we define an event is often determined by the perspective of those making the determination.

And so it should be concerning the worst natural disaster in this country in the last half of the 20th century—Hurricane Katrina.

But the tragedy of Katrina is not that a Category 5 hurricane struck New Orleans, a coastal town that is located below sea level. The tragedy of Katrina is not just that the levees intended to keep water out of that flood-plane, in fact failed.

The real tragedy is that people who could have helped ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands of victims of the storm did not do all that they could have humanly done.

The people who could and should have done the most to help watched the victims and called them “looters” and apparently concluded the people they saw were not real “Americans,” they were some sub-class of humans who did not deserve “equal protection under law.” They called those people “refugees,” and they simply looked the other way in the face of their human suffering.

Again and again, victims have complained that their worst suffering was “man-made,” not suffering caused by the storm. Just look at the poor island nations of the Caribbean. Cuba was slammed by the storm, but did not suffer anything like the unspeakable human toll suffered here in the richest country in the world. Officials there are concerned about the welfare of all their citizens, not just the wealthy, not just those with White skin.

For me—a person who stayed safe and dry, comfortable in my home with my family throughout the ordeal—for me, the pain came from watching the suffering go un-addressed, from listening to the federal government postulate that the victims may have been “better off,” because, despite the fact that they lost their homes and everything that was in their homes, they were now out of the dreadful ghetto-life they had been living in New Orleans.

So, in the world of alternate universes, I wonder: what if Hurricane Katrina had been Katrina the Terrorist? Maybe then we would have been upset at the humans responsible for willfully worsening the suffering of the innocent civilian victims of that tragic weather event. Maybe then the human perpetrators responsible for much of the suffering would have been brought before the bar of justice.

But then, who am I kidding? Those responsible for the 9-11 attack have not been captured, while this country remains bogged down in a bloody war in Iraq, with no end in sight—not until “the job is done” over there. In that way, this country will honor the lives of those who died needlessly in Iraq by sending hundreds more to die in that war which can never be won by this country…but I digress.

I’d like to see us concentrate more on compassion and all out efforts to win the wars which can be won, like the forgotten war on poverty, and the one for compassion for our fellow human beings, regardless of race, religion, or national origin.

Peace.

Askia Muhammad is editor of National Scene News Bureau, which provides editorial, audio and photographic content for broadcast and print clients, including The Final Call, National Public Radio (NPR), Soundprint, WPFW-FM and The Washington Informer.