NOLA Survivors Should Be So Lucky

The other day it was reported that the state of Virginia, nearly a year after the Virginia Tech massacre took place, will be awarding the families of the students killed $100,000 per student in compensation.

This got me to thinking about the comparison of this issue and how the survivors of the failure of NOLA's federally-maintained levees are being treated.

For NOLA flood survivors who lost family members including breadwinners due to this massive manmade catastrophe not only are not seeing one red cent in compensation for these individuals. We are witnessing mainstream media silence about the culpability of a federal goverment which should have kept up these levees and a Bush Administration which first cut the funding for these levees back in 2001 in the first place.

Instead, BushCo and its corporate media mouthpieces, on the extremely rare occasions this issue has been covered, have been spouting the Big Lie that the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana had been responsible for levee maintenance and upkeep.

So it's as if, unlike the lives of the young people at VA Tech which had so tragically been cut short, the lives of those who drowned in New Orleans matter not one whit to a federal government desirous of absolving itself of its guilt in their deaths. I mean, of course, you can't put a price on a human life and similar cliches, but such money might help the bereaved put their lives back together.

When conservative guru Grover Norquist uttered his now-infamous mantra about making government so small you could drown it in a bathtub, little did he know how appropriate this metaphor would be regarding BushCo's drowning of New Orleans.

But back to flood survivors who lost family members on 8/29. They deserve, and should demand, the same attention, respect, and above all compensation received by the surviving family members of the VA Tech students--or of 9/11, for that matter. And they need to demand it loudly in a way other Americans and the mainstream media can hear.