it's all here in black and white

We have a bit of a dilemma here at chez Jimbo’s girlfriend. The little woman needs her eight hours of sleep, whereas “the big man” (as my boss referred to me this week) only requires about six. By the way, I think my boss called me that because I’m a dynamic guy with vision—a man capable of doing things on a grand scale and who can accomplish tasks of large proportion—rather than because of my girth. At least, I’m hoping he did.

The dilemma arises from the fact that during her last two hours of sleep, I am awake, and lying in bed thinking about things. Frequently, my brain gets sore from thinking, so I get up and drink coffee and pound on the keyboard. It is early on one such morning here and I am thinking too much again. There were two kids in the street last night; a week ago today we bought a ceiling fan and there is a disaster going on in New Orleans. In my mind this morning, I am connecting the three. Well, really, the kids aren’t connected. They just got me thinking.

Pardon my French, but we live on a cul-de-sac. I don’t know the exact translation, but that means there is a big circle in front of our house, rather than just a two-lane street. When I turned off of a heavily traveled street last night, coming home from work, on to our cul-de-sac, I saw two very young children playing in the busy street. In the one hundred yards from that intersection to the garage, I had time to mull the situation over in my mind and by the time I turned off the ignition I was telling myself:

“Jimbo, you dumb shit, a hundred yards ago you should have parked the car and chased down those kids.”

I ran back to the intersection and got there about the same time one of my neighbors did and we each rounded up a child. The kids were too young to speak, or didn’t have anything to say, but we asked them where they lived and they couldn’t tell us, so we took them to a house where we thought they lived. This was the house where the black family lives, but there was no one home.

Some of you are probably asking, “Jimbo, when you find stray kids, you try to dump them off on the black family?”

Others are probably saying, “Oh, massa Jimbo, we po’ folks be takin’ care of yo’ kids when you fin’ dem in da street. Yessuh, massa Jimbo.”

Ha, ha.

I then went to a house where I knew the people had foster children and when the guy came to the door I told him we found some kids and asked if they might be his. He yelled to his wife asking if all their kids were there. She said yes and he told me they weren’t his and began to close the door. Then his wife said, “Oh, wait.”

A recount revealed they were two kids short. The guy asked me, “Are these black kids?”

I said, yes. We found a home for them, and it turns out they were, indeed, his kids.

When we had been knocking on the door of the house of the black family, several of the neighbors came out of their houses and two neighbors said they had seen them playing in the street and a third said he had called the police. Until the fourth neighbor and I showed up, however, nobody had made an effort physically to remove them from traffic. I had two thoughts. The first was that it seems as if we are becoming afraid to get involved. The second was, would they have done something if the children were white?

There seems still to be, forty years after the civil rights bill, a division in society.

A week ago today we went to Lowe’s and bought a ceiling fan for a bedroom that Jimbo’s girlfriend uses as her home office. By the way, although I used a few of “those” words during the installation, the fan works well and looks really nice. The Lowe’s at which we purchased it is in a less affluent area of town. There were only two checkout lanes open of the ten or so at the front of the store, and the lines were lengthy. While approximately half of the people in line were as white as we are, there were a number of black people in the line with us. I couldn’t help but wonder whether there would have been more checkout lanes open if the store was located in one of the more affluent suburbs. For those long-time readers, you may recall a similar gripe I made about a K-Mart, which is just down the street from Lowe’s.

http://jimboandhisfriends.blogspot.com/2005/02/journey-into-k-mart.html

I think I covered the subject pretty well in that February blog, so I won’t rehash it, but it leads me to my third point. Earlier this week we witnessed a catastrophe of biblical proportions. One can only look at what happened on the gulf coast and in New Orleans and wish a better future to all of the people who were affected by this tragedy. Those of you around me who have been listening to me talking about what a piss-poor job the Bush administration did to help these people know how I feel about the government’s response. I realize, however, in the city of New Orleans, there are some logistical nightmares to overcome to respond to what happened, so no matter how well prepared we were, help would have been slow in coming.

I can’t help but think, however, if New Orleans would have been a city that was not comprised of 67% African American residents, we would have reacted more quickly. Had the hurricane hit Kennebunkport, Maine, instead of New Orleans, I would be willing to wager help would have been there before the winds stopped blowing. Considering we had so much warning that there would be bad things happening in New Orleans, we were unprepared. We can all hang our heads in shame that the Republicans in congress and the President did this to us. We can all hang our heads in shame that we cast the pearls of our recent budget surplus before these swine, making them happier than pigs in defecation as they financed their pork barrel projects and left disaster relief to chance.

I guess the government figured that the people of New Orleans could wait for the aid to come much as they have had to wait in the checkout lines of their retail stores. Now, I guess well have to wait to see whether it is our government or the government of some third-world country who shows up with aid first. We won’t continue to be a country that is first-rate if we treat some of our citizens as second-class and end up with a section of the country that is third world.