Tales of a Shrink

Apparently, people do read this blog, judging from the e-mails that I got in response to my open letter to Anne Rice. Here are snippets from three e-mails I have received, and my responses.

It is short-sighted of you to refuse to recognize that the genocide occurring in New Orleans is the responsibility of everyone in the country.

Wrong. The genocide--and I agree that "genocide" is exactly the word--of the poor and the black in New Orleans is everyone's responsibility. Many of us are, indeed, facing that responsibility in the most effective way that we can. I'm only speaking for myself here, but I honestly had no idea that the government would be caught with their pants down like this. I pay my taxes in good faith, knowing that most of the money goes to kill people against my will in countries across the ocean; however, I always assumed that Uncle Sam was storing away some of that money for a rainy day. I guess that I was wrong. I assumed that all the talk about "Homeland Security" wasn't just hot air--I tend to believe people when they tell me they are trying to make the country safer. And I think that most Americans are like me: we had no idea that New Orleans was in increased danger of being washed away because of Bush's policies. Now that the worst case scenario has come to pass, we are doing what we can. Unfortunately, the great agency that we had trusted to do this work in our proxy, our government, fucked up.

It sounds like you are blaming the victims.

Read more carefully, then. I understand that the people who were caught in the flood did not have the ability to leave the city. I understand that people who are desperate will resort to stealing food if they are starving. I don't understand why it is acceptable lump everyone in America together and to criticize us for not doing enough. If the Feds are at a loss--if FEMA can't muster up a good response, what makes anyone think that private citizens could do any better? It is not fair to shift the responsibility from the government to the citizens because the government dropped the ball.

You are a white male, and have privilege. I am not surprised that you have no sympathy for the people of color who are dying in the streets of New Orleans.

What the fuck? Of course I have sympathy for people who are lost, sick, frightened and the dying. What I don't have sympathy for, or any time for, are the self-righteous who tell the world how they should live their lives. Which reminds me: I'm not going to dignify this with any further response.

The more that I think about the Anne Rice letter the angrier that I get. If you want to see an appropriate response, go here and read the open letter from the Times-Picayune. It expresses the same sentiment without the holier-than-thou crap in Rice's epistle.