Bus People
A little reminder that this is not a nice, safe world we live in. God promised Noah that "never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth". For a lot of people down in New Orleans, that doesn’t seem to be true.
You can only shake your head when you see news anchors asking why they didn’t evacuate despite having 36 hours of warning. Why they didn’t pile onto their SUVs and drive off before it was too late.
These are probably the same people I was talking to three years ago, when they started bombarding Kabul. They were telling me "no, the civilians have all left, they’re all military targets". These people could not wrap their heads around the idea that some people don’t have cars, that moving out of a city is not an option when you have barely enough for bus fare downtown, let alone out of the state.
Bus people. People who hold down two or three jobs to feed their families, people whose credit ratings are so bad even used car dealers won’t give them loans. People with no medical insurance. People who rent. People who have to take public transportation to work.
And I am one of those people. Oh, slightly better off - I’m not working a McJob, I’m not supporting any dependents, and I’ve got a job that lets me telecommute most of the time. But I still have a two to three-hour commute by bus and BART every morning. I don’t have medical insurance. Don’t know if I can afford it, even. No car, no driver’s license.
And people like us, when something big comes, when public utilities fail, we’re the ones who’ll get squeezed through the rips in your inadequate safety nets. If the Big One hits the West Coast, and California slides into the sea, I’m not gonna be able to get very far on foot.
It’s telling that they send troops to take care of the looters first. I can totally sympathize with these people - when you’ve lived all your life on the wrong side of the department store display window, when you’ve got precious little to lose, and you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a deserted city with no cops and no white people, you’re gonna damn well pick up that brick and go through that window.
People say the Boxing Day Tsunami relief efforts were handled better than Katrina. No looting, no arson. Of course it was better. People in Indonesia and India, they’re used to calamities. Typhoons hit every year, earthquakes every few. People know how to work together to get through them, and the tsunami was just a little more water than usual. People are used to not getting government help. Oh, people die, villages wiped out, but over there, people die all the time. You pick up your life and move on.
Here they need to go all hysterical and stuff. Finger pointing, even while the rescue operations were underway. It’s all politics. The rebels and government troops in Aceh were smart enough to lay down arms and pitch in after the tsunami. Because it was their relatives dying, people they knew.
Oh, well. It’s a little reminder that we live in a dangerous, unpredictable world. And we need to learn to cherish the moments we have left, because it can all be taken away.
