11:51 a.m. - 2005-10-08
Misguided People
Sometimes its impossible to understand how some people can become so misguided. This morning I was driving down the road listening to Rush Limbaugh, as I usually do if I happen to be driving around that time of day, when I heard this guy call in from New Orleans, well he was actually a refugee from New Orleans calling from Houston. Anyway this guy was angry with the Bush administration for not providing aid in time to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. This guy was saying that the Bush administration purposely withheld aid from the hurricane victims because they were black. Now to any fair-minded person this is obviously a ridiculous notion and I was floored upon hearing others call into the program with similar viewpoints. I decided to focus on this particular subject not because I think it’s a sound point for political debate, but because I feel that it this is a symptom of a much broader issue that plagues the urban thought process. When one adopts the role as a victim in any given situation they are automatically assuming that they have lost control over their own condition and are at the complete mercy of others. In this case the gentleman on the phone is telling us that the horrible condition in which the people of New Orleans find themselves in was perpetrated by the bush administration and that no one in that situation has any control over their own condition. Now, this is a very dangerous thought process to fall into and it’s a thought process that is very prevalent in the urban community. The unfortunate people that find themselves stuck in this misguided way of thinking blame anyone but themselves for the condition that they are in and take no personal responsibility. By blaming the government or whomever for their problems they are simultaneously giving up any personal power that they may have to effectively better their own conditions. The chaos that we are currently seeing down in the gulf coast is a direct result of this type of misguided thought process.
