The Sable Verity

I don’t talk about it very much, but I had the very horrible honor of working with FEMA after Hurricane Katrina, so, it’s not just about what get’s reported in the news, it’s about what I’ve also seen with my own eyes.

If we learned nothing else from Katrina, it’s this:

1.  If you wait for your government to save you in a natural disaster, you’ll likely die.

2.  FEMA does not care, about the life, the home, the job, the family member you lost in a natural disaster.

3.  “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

Alright, I’ll admit I added that last one just for myself.  On with it already.

This report from CNN:

Prisons in Mississippi got coffee makers, pillowcases and dinnerware — all intended for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The state’s Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks took more coffee makers, cleaning supplies and other items.

Plastic containers ended up with the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration.

Colleges, volunteer fire departments and other agencies received even more.

But the Mississippi hurricane victims who originally were intended to receive the supplies got nothing, a CNN investigation has found.

“It’s scary to know that there are supplies that they are harboring and people [are] in need right now as we speak today,” said Sharon Hanshaw, director of Coastal Women for Change, a nonprofit group helping storm victims.

Last month, CNN revealed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had stored $85 million worth of household items in warehouses for two years. Instead of giving the supplies to victims of the 2005 hurricane, FEMA declared them surplus and gave them all away to federal agencies and 16 states in February.

The state of Louisiana — the most hard-hit by the storm — had not asked for any of the supplies, prompting outrage in the community after the original CNN report.

CNN’s investigation showed that Mississippi was one of the 16 states that took the FEMA supplies, but it did not distribute them to Katrina victims.

Jim Marler, director of Mississippi’s surplus agency, failed to return repeated phone calls over several months to explain what happened.

Agency spokeswoman Kym Wiggins said, “There may be a need, but we were not notified that there was a great need for this particular property.”

That doesn’t sit well with most aid groups in Mississippi. “You would have to be living under a rock not to know there is still a need,” said Cass Woods, the project coordinator of Coastal Women for Change.

Wiggins said that nonprofit organizations must meet federal guidelines and register with the state and that no such groups helping the needy or homeless were registered with Mississippi’s surplus agency.

“There is no specific designation outside of a disaster period that says we have to have sustained properties going to the disaster area,” Wiggins said.

CNN interviewed the leaders of eight nonprofits helping Katrina victims at a Biloxi, Mississippi, church used as a staging area for community groups. All said they had no idea these items were available, and most had no idea the surplus agency existed.

“We work so hard to help people in our community when the government is holding back stuff that we can use to give people,” said Glenda Perryman, director of United Hearts Community Action Agency.

Roberta Avila, director of the Mississippi Coast Interfaith Disaster Task Force, said, “It’s needed even more now than right after the storm.”

Records show Mississippi’s surplus agency received household supplies, including dinnerware sets, towels, shirts, pants, shoes and cleaning items.

Those are the kind of household items that Howard and Gloria Griffith said they could have used since the storm and still need. The Griffiths said they spent every penny to rebuild their home. But they can’t afford to finish it, so they’re still living in a FEMA trailer on their property in Biloxi with their teenage son.

“I’ve never seen none of it,” said Gloria Griffith after CNN showed her photos of some of the supplies that FEMA had kept in storage.

FEMA said it was costing more than $1 million a year to store the supplies, but officials have not been able to answer why the agency didn’t get the supplies to Katrina victims. Both FEMA and the General Services Administration said the items originally were purchased or donated for victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

In the wake of the CNN investigation, a FEMA official said the agency was launching an internal probe into the storage of the household supplies.

Bill Stallworth, executive director of the Hope Coordination Center in Biloxi that helps rehouse Katrina victims, said he’s astounded that the supplies were given away.

Stallworth and other community leaders said if they had known the FEMA items were available, they would have begged for them.

“And when I hear people stand up and just beat their chest and say we’ve got everything under control, that’s when I just want to slap them upside the head and say, ‘Get a grip, get a life,’ ” said Stallworth, who is also a Biloxi city councilman.

We’re bickering over who will pay Hill’s campaign debt (cuz it won’t be her), yet as trite as it sounds, children ARE still starving in the world.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) has appealed for extra resources to help thousands of severely malnourished children in Ethiopia.

The organisation says more than 126,000 children could be affected.  The World Food Programme says nearly 3m Ethiopians will need emergency food aid this year because of late rains and the high cost of food.

A BBC correspondent who visited a feeding centre says she saw a child whose arm was as thin as a man’s thumb.

Very, VERY curious to hear what your thoughts are on this move.  Did you expect it?  Did you want it?  Do you think it was a mistake?  Share, share, and share some more…

My personal opinion?  I think it was a mistake to leave the church.

Barack Obama resigned Saturday from his Chicago church — where controversial sermons by his former pastor and other ministers had created repeated political headaches for the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination — his campaign confirmed.

The resignation comes days after the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a visiting Catholic priest, mocked Obama’s Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, for crying in New Hampshire during the runup to the primary there.

Previously, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ and Obama’s minister for about 20 years — drew unwanted attention for the campaign when videos of several of his fiery sermons surfaced.

In them, Wright suggested the U.S. government may be responsible for the spread of AIDS in the black community and equated some American wartime activities to terrorism.

Obama has said he was not present for the controversial sermons by Wright or Pfleger and had condemned both — most recently saying he was “deeply disappointed” by Pfleger’s “divisive, backward-looking rhetoric.”

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/31/1090902.aspx

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/31/report-obama-resigns-from_n_104488.html

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/31/obama-resigns-from-controversial-church/

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/31/obama.church/index.html 

So my girl, Josephine (who you all will get a nice intro to next week as a “guest” contributor (that means permanent, but don’t tell her I said that); Josie to the homies, sent along this little bit of information in an email she entitled “yet another reason I no longer attend Catholic Church…”

“VATICAN WILL EXCOMMUNICATE WOMEN PRIESTS  The Vatican issued its most explicit decree so far against the ordination of female priests on Thursday, punishing them and the bishops who try to ordain them with automatic excommunication.  The decree was written by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, giving it immediate effect.  A Vatican spokesman said the decree made the church’s existing ban on female priests more explicit by clarifying that excommunication would follow all such ordinations. “

Translation: “We still cannot tollerate, accept, stand in the presense of, or humble ourselves to the innate power of the woman, as sacred as she is.”

Did I stutter?  You heard me. 

Sacred.

Powerful.

Always have been, always will be.

I would have to agree, this is yet another reason why I too, no longer attend Catholic church…sorry grandma.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24878944/from/ET/

You know, I used to like Nas.  It was a long time ago, but, it was there.  “If I ruled the world” became the anthem of 1999:

Imagine smoking weed in the streets without cops harassin
Imagine going to court with no trial
Lifestyle cruising blue behind my waters
No welfare supporters more conscious of the way we raise our daughters
Days are shorter, nights are colder
Feeling like life is over, these snakes strike like a cobra
The world’s hot my son got knocked evidently
It’s elementary, they want us all gone eventually
Trooping out of state for a plate knowledge
If coke was cooked without the garbage we’d all have the top dollars
Imagine everybody flashin, fashion
Designer clothes, lacing your click up with diamond rolls
Your people holdin dough, no parole
No rubbers, go in raw imagine law with no undercovers
Just some thoughts for the mind
I take a glimpse into time
watch the blimp read “The World Is Mine”

If I ruled the world Imagine that
I’d free all my sons, I love em love em baby
Black diamonds and pearls Could it be, if you could
be mine, we’d both shine
If I ruled the world Still livin for today, in
these last days and times

That Nas is evidently dead.  You know, I have to say as a disclaimer, that I no longer listen to the radio, unless it’s jazz or talk radio; all those little hip hop, rap, pop culture radio stations get on my last nerve.  Indy, underground, news or nothin’ for me, and I’ve been that way for a while.  I don’t let my kids listen to it in the car either, though my daughter is allowed to in her room, at a respectable volume of course.

Instead, I rely on word of mouth recommendations from my friends and music critics that I share common tastes with.  I don’t do MTV, BET, VH1 or any of that stuff either, matter-fact, there’s no cable in this house, by choice.

I know, gasp and clutch the pearls, I deny my children cable.  So shoot me.

So when I heard that Nas was releasing an album entitled Nigger, I had a black out moment, and had to check what I was being told.  Then I went back to ignoring him, as I usually do, but this time with more disgust towards him and his so called ‘wife’.  I saw the photos of the nigger shirt and the nigger jacket on the red carpet.  I wanted to slap the both of them right then.

Let me also say this; in my house, in my family, in my circle, niggER and niggA are the same damn thing.  NiggER is a reflection of historical, racial hatred and degredation, and niggA is the internalized racism that embraces the culture of racial inferiority.  It’s not a debate for me so save you’re breath.  If I ever, and I mean ever, here my son say that word I might have to slap him in the mouth.

Usually, I refer to it as the ‘n word’, but because of Nas’s dumb ass, nigger is being searched online like gang busters.  If I use the word nigger, the more likely you are to see this post.

Which brings me to it’s purpose:  If you see Nas, slap the shit outta him for me and tell him Sable sent’cha*.

First of all, the more we embrace and attempt to normalize words like nigger, the more removed from reality we become.  If you think it means nothing, if you think niggA doesn’t have any negative inference, you’ve been successfully brainwashed.

And then we have this fool Nas, who has successfully transformed himself (and the chick on his arm) into black trash, making a spectacle out of himself and hi-hop, out there trying to put a name on an album that would make Al Shaprton have a coronary and would have civil rights activists across the country up in arms, not to mention how the rest of the world’s media would spin it.

The album would have never been successfully released with the title “nigger” unless he burned those motherfuckers at home on his laptop.

So he wanted attention by any means necessary, and he got it.  Everyone gave it to him.

You might even say I’m doing the same, but I’d disagree.  Do you want to know what nigger means?  Well, then have a glance.

That is the last word these men, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of others heard: Nigger.

*this, however passionately written, does not endorse or applaud violence towards said jack ass, the artist known as Nas.

Hours after his rejection of Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement, John McCain rejected the backing of Pastor Rod Parsley, who said that Islam was a “conspiracy of spiritual evil.”

“I believe there is no place for that kind of dialogue in America,” he told the Associated Press. “And I believe that even though he endorsed me, and I didn’t endorse him, the fact is that I repudiate such talk, and I reject his endorsement.”

The decision to cut off Parsley could have the bigger impact on the presidential race: in 2004, the Ohio pastor was a major figure in an unprecedented evangelical turnout operation that helped an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative pass overwhelmingly, and which was widely believed to have helped President Bush carry the critical swing state state – and the presidency — by a slimmer one.

The leader of the World Harvest Church in Columbus also founded the Center for Moral Clarity — an organization which has held that adultery should be treated as a crime – during the last presidential cycle.