“The Fine Print”, by Michael Schrader

Jesse Jackson Is Right – It Is A Racial Thing

(Written and posted 16 September 2005)

Before a “lady” vented her fury on the Gulf Coast, Mother Nature vented her fury on Oklahoma with 70 mile per hour winds, large hail, lots of lightning – you know, the typical summer storm in the land of the Red Men. After this particular storm passed, I went out to assess the damage – a big part of a tree blown over, my flags (flag, pole, and brackets) ripped off the side of the house and deposited a hundred feet away, and several pieces of the barn roof stripped off and blown five hundred feet to the edge of the upper pasture. Of course, after assessing the damage, I did what I thought everyone in my situation should do – I got the supplies I needed to put the roof back on (a hammer and nails, as the tin roofing was salvageable) and to cut up the fallen tree (a saw) and began to repair the damage. After one day of hard work by myself and three of the Schraderlings, lots of scrapes and bruises, smashing my thumb countless times with a hammer, a fall off a roof into a nice pile of dried cow manure, and having every muscle in my body reintroduce itself to my brain, the necessary repairs were made. Looking back in retrospect, I responded incorrectly. Instead of actually showing the initiative to help my own situation, I should have flailed my arms about in the air and cursed the government for not helping me out.

Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered much if I did. You see, when it is a country person who needs help from the government, help never comes. You see, us country folk are just a bunch of stupid redneck bumpkins, and we get what we deserve. If we are stupid enough to live in an area that is prone to natural disasters (such as Oklahoma, where the wind comes racing across the plains…), then when something bad happens, it is our fault for choosing to live there.

Over the past several weeks, I have grown quite weary about all of the crying and whining about what happened on the Gulf Coast. Natural disasters happen; deal with it. What I don’t understand is where were all the do-gooders and the bleeding hearts when the victims were rural folks? I remember too well the Flood of 1993. Tens of thousands of people were displaced for months on end, whole towns were destroyed (Valmeyer, Illinois, rebuilt the entire town in a new, higher location), but I don’t recall seeing any stars holding telethons to raise money for the people who were flooded. I remember seeing the entire city of Sainte Genevieve, Missouri (another very historic French city worthy of preservation) filling sandbags at the schoolyard, building a six foot tall sandbag wall on top of a levee, and diligently monitoring the levee for weeks waiting for the Mississippi River to return to its banks. I did not see the Corps of Engineers rushing to Sainte Genevieve’s aid. No one did; but yet, by all the citizenry working together to protect the town, they were able to somehow defy the odds and beat the river. (Note: the people were too busy sandbagging to have time to loot!)

There were numerous levees that broke that year. The Missouri River punched a hole through a levee and carved a new channel to the Mississippi through Saint Charles County, much of which was under water. I do not remember seeing the Corp trying to drop massive sandbags into the holes; in fact, other than the local levee districts, little effort was made at all to prevent Saint Charles County from becoming a huge lake. Unlike New Orleans, which at the rate it is being pumped will have only been under water for a little more than a month, parts of Missouri and Illinois were under water for months, until the rains stopped and the waters naturally receded. Not once during those months did I hear of Sean Penn boating around the flooded areas or John Travolta flying overhead with flood relief.

When you live in Oklahoma like I do, you come to accept that tornadoes are a fact of life. Just because we Oklahomans understand that with any given supercell our lives may be blown away in the wind doesn’t mean that tornadoes aren’t destructive and traumatic when they occur. I don’t see people falling all over themselves helping Oklahomans out after a particularly nasty tornado, like the F4 that hit Moore in 1999. No, instead we get the cavalier attitude of “Well, them dumb-ass Okies shouldn’t be living there, anyway, knowing that they could get hit by a tornado.” But, it’s okay for a bunch of people to live in a city where you can see ships pass above you, because, as we all know, city folk are sophisticated and cultured and worth saving whereas country folk are only a bunch of stupid, uneducated redneck hicks who listen to Toby Keith, watch NASCAR, and have babies when they are fourteen.

Jesse Jackson is right, that race has everything to do with the response. While everybody has bent over backwards to come to the aid of a predominantly black city, they couldn’t give a crud about the white rural parishes, such as Plaquemines and Saint Bernard, where the eye of the storm hit and where virtually everything is destroyed. What is really pathetic is that the first troops to arrive in Saint Bernard Parish were the Royal Canadian Mounties. Oh yeah—you can’t grandstand and pat yourself on the back for being liberal and open-minded by saving rural white people; they just don’t get you any political capital.

Since that big wind hit, I still have lots of supplies for repairs—just in case I need them. After all, I don’t think that I will be seeing Sean Penn or John Travolta anytime soon. (Except, of course, on my television!)

BACK TO “THE FINE PRINT” INDEX