Instead of pouring our righteous anger and indignation out onto a political system we can't really change by calling for an impeachment that will never happen, why don't we start developing some ideas for the next few months that will demonstrate that we on the left have the real plans? The refugee and housing crisis following Katrina will become yet another impending nightmare if we do not start preparing for it NOW!
This administration has proven it can't take the initiative in helping America, so it's up to us to create a few silver linings.
Here are some thoughts:
1. As people start to get resettled under ad hoc living circumstances, we should make sure that the families, who will be majority African American, are not pushed into ghettoes and become further forgotten. Beyond paying attention to where these families end up settling for the short term, let's make sure that we try to prevent them from being forced to the outskirts of our society.
This is a real opportunity to diversify some heavily segregated American communities. As we are registering displaced students from NOLA, we should make an effort to bring African American students into predominantly white school districts.
In Hurricane Katrina, we saw how horribly segregated our society is - let's not reinforce it in the aftermath. Katrina can finally be America's opportunity to genuinely start on the path to desegregating our schools.
2. Now, more than ever, America will need a large scale Affordable Housing Act. The government should start helping to provide financing for not only refugees, but those throughout America's cities that cannot afford adequate housing. Yet again, this is another opportunity to wake America from its sluggish indifference (or as I almost wrote in a moment of typo induced irony "sindifference"). The housing programs back in the New Deal were notoriously racist and just created suburban sprawl - let's make smart urban planning, adequate housing and fair practices the mantra to seriously revitalizing our housing stock and creating urban renewal without gentrification.
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Those are only two ideas that struck me on the walk home from the supermarket.
Here's your chess board: Hurrican Katrina happened. The levees broke. The administration screwed up...now, what are YOUR ideas?
Why are we different from Republicans? Not only would we have never let this happen, but now that it has, lets show `em we've got better solutions. We've got ideas...they've got nada.