What I Hear in Memphis Disturbs Me

I work in a restaurant downtown. 90% of my co-workers are black and we have had CNN on the TV during work. We have all been shocked and enraged at what has and, as of writing this entry, is still happening in New Orleans. The clientele of the restaurant is overwhelmingly white and upper-middle class. I have almost gotten into fights with customers because of things I have heard them say and what they have actually said to me. On Friday, a business woman was watching the TV. She heard the complaints I and another worker had of the relief effect. She turned to us and argued most of the blame should be on the people who stayed in New Orleans. My co-worker and I were shocked. We tried as nicely as possible to explain that these people couldn't leave. I even explained to her that FEMA ran test scenarios two years ago that said if New Orleans had to evacuated an estimated 100,000 people would not be able to leave the city. She just didn't grasp it. She was incapable of empathizing with people different from herself in extremely difficult situations. Why couldn't they just pack up the Suburban and leave town like everyone else. My co-worker and I just turned our backs to her and walked off.
Today, I was even more shocked at what I heard. Four, fat, middle-aged crackers dressed in camoflage were just back from duck hunting. (I think I have figured out why white males love guns so much. Small dicks and impotenece. They need big guns to go kill animals, not for food, but for sexual satisfaction. I think in some strange way golf gives sexually satisfaction for these guys as well. Pathetic.) Well these fat fucks, who look like sitting in a blind on a lake, calling their prey with some screwed up kazoo, was about the limit of their physical exertion for the thrill of the hunt, start talking racist shit hidden as a call for personal responsibility. I quote "those people have been living off the government so long they just expect it to do everything for them." refering to all the black people stranded in New Orleans. Then they stated how New Orleans doesn't need to be rebuilt. They finished off their insightful comments with the now standard, white, suburban, republican, Bush-apologist statement of "they should have evacuated when they were told."
Well fuck them. These crackers live in their cultural dead zone of suburbia, playing out such meaningless existences that their emotional fix is blasting the heads off animals. These are the same people who "support our troops" by putting chinese made stickers of American flags on their SUV's while gladly accepting tax breaks and not having their own children enlist. These are the same people who mercilessly judge those trying to survive in a flooded city ravaged by a hurricane for days with no food or water, yet get in fights at the gas station trying to buy fuel before it goes up $.10 a gallon. These are the people that have rationalized social darwinism's cult of greed and disregard for their fellow man into virtues. People are simply poor because they are lazy or God thinks they are just bad people. These are the people who have gotten their's by standing on the shoulders of others but have somehow convinced themselves they've climbed Mt. Everest with one hundred pounds of rocks on their backs. I'm sure when bad times come, they will fully understand it was of their own making and refuse help of the government, whether it be unemployment checks when the recession comes, FEMA assistance if the big earthquake ever hits, or the CDC medical help when avian bird flu starts killing people of all classes and races. All of these things could be your own fault. YOU don't have skills needed anymore. YOU chose to live in an earthquake zone. YOU didn't wash your hands enough. It is always your fault and responsibility to deal with whatever misfortune befalls YOU. But I'm pretty sure these folks will not want to hear that, because they don't really believe in personal responsibility. It is just a cover for being bigots.