I'm Fuming

I am so angry right now, I have a number of bones to pick and I'm going to pick them clean!

First, what is up with this bridge collapsing in Minneapolis?? Bridges in America should not be collapsing! Why is there not more money being poured into infrastructure? You want to talk about HOMELAND SECURITY? well then secure the fucking homeland! Who is the head of the Federal Department of Transportation? Probably some moronic college cokehead friend of George W's who doesn't know the first thing about bridges or roads.

Second, let's talk about rescue. The current rescue and recover teams are making valiant efforts in extremely dangerous underwater conditions but it seems as though at times the water is too dangerous for even trained professionals. But I'm pretty sure there are teams trained for even conditions such as these... too bad they're in the fucking DESERT in Iraq.

People - make the connections! The president wants to keep taxes low, fund a massive war, and basically divert important resources away from every sector in this country AND THESE ARE THE CONSEQUENCES:
'Hurricane' Katrina - it wasn't the hurricane that caused the damage. It was the flooding that resulted from insufficient levees. And what hampered the rescue effort? The rescuers were fighting in a desert halfway across the world.
A Bridge falls in Minneapolis - the money, support and pressure should have been there for infrastructure projects. The rescuers should be there, but they're otherwise engaged. The resources should be there, but they've drowned in the bathtub along with the government. Yeah, I said it. You drown the government, you drown the resources too.


Enough about politics, on to the 24-hour news cycle. After it's repeated so many times it fails to be news, it's just information. And you only need so much information. You know what will happen? People will watch CNN, or MSNBC or their local news over and over and over and they won't get any new information; they'll just get scared. I don't know what the solution to this is, but let it be known that the 24-hr news cycle pisses me off!

And the New York Times, anyone who knows me or has received an article from me knows I'm a fan, but even they have aroused my ire. I check the NYT every morning; in fact it's my homepage. I checked it late yesterday morning AFTER the bridge collapsed and there was nothing on the front page about it. In one of my lessons later that day I was teaching students vocabulary for urban landscapes and when one student learned 'overpass' she said 'oh! An overpass collapsed in the US yesterday, somewhere near Chicago, I think.' And indeed, when I checked the NYT this morning I saw coverage of DAY 2 of the events. Where was day 1??? And this isn't the first time. On CNN I saw reports of floods in China and massive heat waves in Europe, nothing of which I had seen in the NYT.



One thing that did make me happy was that I saw all different backgrounds of people interviewed in Minneapolis - a Mexican immigrant, a white lady, a latino man and a young black male teenager. Because honestly, from living in a foreign country I get the feeling that people think all Americans are white. And who can blame them? I mean, techinically I'm not American, right? I'm African-American. The only people who don't have to hypenate are white people.


I'm still mad, but I'm done picking bones now.