Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Who cares for the brown-skinned in the colonies!

Life just happens way too fast.

Only a month ago, in my response-comments to this post, I wrote:
Yep, it is a colony. Like how Puerto Rico is. Like how American Samoa is. Without using the word "colony" John Oliver describes that condition in the video that I had embedded. 
And we treat them that way because, ahem, they are brown-skinned.
And then Hurricane Maria happened.  The lives of three million Puerto Ricans completely devastated.  It is a huge humanitarian crisis.

But, apparently Americans do not care.  Why so?
Many Americans don’t realize that what happened in Puerto Rico is a domestic disaster, not a foreign one.
A new poll of 2,200 adults by Morning Consult found that only 54 percent of Americans know that people born in Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, are U.S. citizens.
Now, leave alone the notion that we ought to respond to a humanitarian crisis wherever that might be.  But, we can and should care at least about fellow citizens, right?  But, then how many Americans know that fellow citizens include the people of Puerto Rico, Guam, St. John, ...  More importantly, how many of the fascist's solid base know about these fellow-citizens?
Inaccurate beliefs on this question matter, because Americans often support cuts to foreign aid when asked to evaluate spending priorities. In our poll, support for additional aid was strongly associated with knowledge of the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans. More than 8 in 10 Americans who know Puerto Ricans are citizens support aid, compared with only 4 in 10 of those who do not.
We Americans are now behaving like how the Bastard Raj and its cigar-chomping bastard did during the famine in Bengal, which was after all only a colony with brown-skinned people!

Tribalism in the 21st century!
In this case, the lack of media attention could lead people to ignore Puerto Rico’s plight. Our sympathies for other people depends in part on whether we see them as fellow members of our tribe. Without more coverage, it may be easy to forget that the people suffering are our fellow Americans.
How did the fascist talk about Puerto Rico?
"This is an island sitting in the middle of an ocean. It’s a big ocean, it’s a very big ocean."
And how does he know about the people there?
"I grew up in New York, so I know many people from Puerto Rico. I know many Puerto Ricans. And these are great people."
The demagogue tweeted a lot more about the NFL than about Puerto Rico!  This is the guy that 63 million, including past commentators here, voted for!  Shame on them!

2 comments:

Ramesh said...

Puerto Rico has been slammed three times this year. They've really had it bad . Maria was a hammer blow.

Going off on a tangent, I am not sure why hurricanes are so devastating in that part of the world, while the equivalent we call as cyclones seem not not to be so disastrous on the east coast of India. Even about 20 years ago, cyclones would routinely cause tens of thousands of deaths in TN, Andhra, Orissa and Bengal. Nowadays, when such a major cyclone hits, there are hardly any casualties and things come back to near normal in less than a week. Combination of better forecasting, evacuation, NDMA (our equivalent of FEMA), the army and navy and the power dept, seems to be handling it pretty well.

Remember Vardah last year. It flattened Chennai. But power was back in 5 days and life limped back to normal fairly quickly.

Why is it so much more devastating in the Caribbean and around the Gulf of Mexico. Are the hurricanes there even more powerful ? Or are there some other meteorological phenomenon at play ?

Sriram Khé said...

I don't think the intensities are comparable at all. Vardah was a super-cyclone, yes, but the wind speeds did not even reach triple digits. Category 4 and 5 hurricanes are insane speeds, from 130 to 160 mph. Cat 5 is practically twice Vardah!!!
And then then rain. Vardah did not bring on a deluge, but these hurricanes do. It is one thing for the roof to blow off in the wind, but the water damage can be even more disastrous. Which is why I think the rain/flood the previous December was a lot more destructive than Vardah.

And, yes, the hurricanes are getting stronger. I blogged about that earlier on. Hotter days are getting way hotter, hurricanes are getting stronger, rainy days are getting way wetter, ... all consistent with what experts had been warning us about. Only the trump-voting white supremacist idiots deny all these.

And, yes, whether it is Houston or Andhra, the advance warning thanks to sophisticated computer models has made loss of lives less common than before.