While Rome burns. . .
Dear Republic:
As Hurricane Katrina demolished New Orleans on Monday and 100,000 poor people, mostly Afro-American, were imperiled, President George W Bush temporized. He did some fundraising in California, frolicked with a guitar for the media, puttered around his ranch, and finally flew over the disaster zone at two thousand feet and the next day played golf. On Thursday he held an upbeat press conference declaring he would fly down to the disaster zone, adding: “I’m not looking forward to going down there.”
As people were drowning in their attics and infants and the elderly were dying from hunger and thirst in New Orleans, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was busy buying shoes, Vice President Dick Cheney was vacationing and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was nonexistent.
The Bush Administration—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—is pathologically indifferent to the cruelty its incompetence inflicts upon others. New Orleans has become Baghdad. It’s fetid waters stink of racism and despicable greed. Why would any Afro-American want to return to that haunted ground? New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, is now a ghost town destroyed by an evangelical, neocon voodoo.
- Stewart Brinton, Vancouver, BC
No cookies for Ms Christy
Dear Republic:
As parents and former Vancouver PAC members who helped organize the Save Our Schools (SOS) campaign in 2002, we're dismayed that any Vancouver civic party would consider endorsing former Education Minister Christy Clark as a candidate.
SOS emerged as a spontaneous grassroots campaign by most of Vancouver's PACs, after our (NPA) School Board Chair revealed that Ms Clark's policies would cause $21 million in cuts for Vancouver alone in the 2002/03 school year, with further cuts in subsequent years. This crisis prompted an unprecedented coming-together of parents from across the city, from all walks of life, ethnic groups and political stripes. We all realized that the only hope for our students lay in our putting differences aside and working together.
We did just that. Our NPA trustees did the same, joining with rival COPE trustees to endorse SOS, as did Vancouver DPAC, which represents all Vancouver PACs. This all-volunteer initiative unleashed an amazing outpouring of energy and we were as surprised as anyone by the incredible response. In just days, we had engaged almost every Vancouver PAC to help collect almost 14,000 letters written in English, Chinese, Punjabi, Vietnamese and Tagalog. Had we not been scrambling to meet budget deadlines, we'd have collected far more.
The carefully-worded letter urged the Minister to fund extra costs that she had imposed on school districts and to reconsider funding changes responsible for the cuts. We never imagined that 14,000 appeals from Vancouver would be met by closed doors. Worse, Minister Clark dismissed the initiative as political and refused to meet with SOS or discuss the concerns. Worse still, her staff attempted to discredit SOS with briefings to local media that forced us to produce resumes of all SOS organizers to prove that we were simply whom we claimed to be—parents from all walks of life and all political persuasions, fighting to protect our children's education.
This is Ms Clark's record. Is this the character that Vancouver's families would want want to see in any of our civic leaders?
- Dawn Steele, Maureen Bayless, Judy Thau, Catherine Evans, Annie Ehman, Cynthia Wong, John Robertson, Charles Menzies, Liz Fendley, Allison McDonald, Betty Rumpel, Kathryn Harrison, Mark Stoakes, Julianne Doctor, Elizabeth Hamel, Patricia Fahrni, Patti Bacchus, Vancouver, BC
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