While rotting corpses floated in the rising tides of the disease infested waters of Louisiana and as African Americans sought safety and food, the devastation of neglect by the American Government was by far more deadly than the contaminated toxic flow the survivors ventured through.

Not even a lifetime of poverty experienced by the victims could now match the three to four days of hardships in the squalid and inhumane conditions of the Houston Astrodome. There, the dead remained for days among the living, a sight so painfully hard to watch let alone to have endured.

I now recall the saddened faces, forever etched in my mind, full of despair and disappointments, disoriented and worried, hungry and starving, frustrated yet calm, surrounded by stiff faced Yankee Military Combatants as if it were a “Slave Concentration Camp” on the west coast of Africa with hordes of people awaiting that wretched slave voyage. The conditions inside the Dome were quite reminiscent of the slave ships that had plied the “Middle Passage” two centuries ago. Like then, the sick, feeble, elderly and young died rapidly from lack of medical care, food and water and where the putrid stench of human waste floats in an overbearing temperature.

Those who are supposed to provide the necessities of life during these kinds of emergencies today are the very descendants of those who were in charge of the slave ships then, and likewise is the same ethnicity of people deprived, marginalized, neglected and continually suppressed.

Serving as classic examples of Uncle Sam’s hypocrisy and uncaring ways, the ill-coordinated, non-effective should-be rescuers were instructed to guard buildings from looters rather than to provide food, medicine, water and evacuation. Oh what a pensive tale of humanity.

The images of white people “taking” goods from a Wal-Mart store with the captions “Whites wading through water to seek food,” while blacks were labeled as looters again exposed the hypocrisy of the white media in cohesion with the racist government of America…together the greatest axis of evil. The apology given by George Bush is akin to mongoose at fowl’s dinner table expressing regret for killing snakes. His track record from the days of being the Governor of Texas to the present Commander in Chief of an invading force on distant lands are clear indications that the man is a mastermind of sending people to their graves.

It is my guess that soon some sweet mouthing enlightened hand picked “adopted brother” of Uncle Sam, Tom that is, will announce that they dream of a day when the flood waters of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana will subside, when African Americans will return with equal opportunities as whites to rebuild their homes and their lives, when the poverty and brutal rabid conditions of the poor will be no more, eradicated and gone forever. But come tomorrow we will all wake to the realities that we have been once again BAMBOOZLED.

The more these calamities unfold, the clearer it is to decipher the difference between truths and lies, justice and injustice within the realm of real and token promises. It has proven time and time again that only the Education of Black Consciousness and Liberated Pride will survive the harsh reality of a brainwashed system. Hopefully we will not be conned by the boastful and impetuous symbolism of the American Flag and its Propaganda Machine. Together we must all bond to help our bothers and sisters in this their greatest time of need.