love one another

a quote from an MSNBC article on current conditions in New Orleans:

"An old man lay dead on a chaise longue as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered with a blanket. Another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

“I don’t treat my dog like that,” 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “I buried my dog.” He added: “You can do everything for other countries, but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military, but you can’t get them down here.”

The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage."

where is the help? we're the greatest country in the world, we travel the globe helping other country's disasters, but why are we so slow to aid the desperate and suffering citizens of New Orleans?

president george w. bush says he's a Christian. well Jesus Christ himself said that his followers can be identified by the following:

"They will know you by your love for one another."

i haven't yet found a way to rectify this with GWB's assertion that he is a Christian. GWB's actions speak louder than his hollow words. its been 5 days since hurricane katrina laid waste to the gulf states. CNN and other news stations tell the tale in images of the horrible suffering and misery taking place. it is heartbreaking. and unbelievable that there is no national guard, no navy, no action taking place fast enough to save the desperate refugees filling up the TV screen.

i live near NYC and 9/11 was an up-close, very personal tragedy for me. i smelled the acrid smoke filled with the stench of the dead burnt victims on that horrible day. a tragedy now eclipsed by the natural disaster unfolding in the south. yet the day after 9/11, the government mobilized and order was restored quickly. national guards at every corner and train station. police everywhere.

but then again, most of 9/11's victims where white middle/upperclass. this new horror's victims are mostly minorities and the poor. is GWB dragging his feet, as well as the rest of the federal government, because of that fact? personally i think it has something to do with the paucity of immediate response, the lack of instant action to help the suffering victims of katrina.

i'm not the only one to think so. to me, this is enormously disturbing.

i don't know what idiotic, myopic Christianity GWB and his greedy oil-baron pals believe in. but its not the real deal. Jesus didn't differentiate one from another. He loved all the same, and told us to do as He did. He said "love one another."

Christian love is giving to others those things that you would want them to give you if you were in their situation -- and it's doing so even if they can't pay you back. In fact, it's doing so especially if they can't pay you back! Christian love is respect for others. It's mercy. It's charity.

i encourage you to show your love, compassion, and mercy for the suffering refugees of this great national tragedy. take 2 minutes right now and go donate -- $10, $20, $100 ~ whatever you can afford. but do it now. i did. then follow it up with a prayer to God that he help the refugees, and that God opens the barbed-wire, greedy hearts of the tyrants who are currently holding this greate nation hostage to their selfish and destructive agenda.