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Jewish World Review Sept 16, 2005 / 12 Elul, 5765 Relief organizers like rival gangs By Joe Scarborough
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Trent Lott's office recently sent me an e-mail, telling me to go to a hospital in dire need of supplies after Katrina. It was from a registered nurse who says babies are walking around in diapers three days old and that they needed my help. The e-mail also said people are being pushed away from the hospital.
So, I drove there with supplies. I meet this person, this federal authority. I said, we're here with the diapers and formula. We understand the children are distressed here.
Do you know what he told me? The guy's arrogant. He said, 'we don't need your stuff. Turn around. Go home.'
This weekend, a friend working with our charity was sitting in church. A person that helps run the Red Cross shipments came up to him and said, 'you all, just stop wasting your time.' The person's, clearly taken back, asks, 'what do you mean? We're feeding all these people. We're helping all these people.' He said, everything you ship over to Mississippi and Louisiana, we're just having to ship back. You're just wasting your time.'
This seems odd when every time we open the door, children and grandmothers break down crying while we hand them food.
We have a serious problem in the United States of America right now by federal bureaucrats and state bureaucrats and local bureaucrats and relief agency bureaucrats — yes, like the Red Cross. There is a level of arrogance. All of these groups are like rival gangs. I have seen it first-hand. Every politician on the ground has seen it first-hand. These people would rather have people in their areas suffer than not get the credit for helping them out.
We have seen it with 10,000 vaccines that we couldn't get from Pensacola, Florida, over to New Orleans. We have seen it with food shipments that FEMA stopped. We have seen Trent Lott talking about how FEMA and the Mississippi groups would not allow trailers to come in. I'm telling you, it is a scandal of epic proportions.
Again, it ain't the FEMA people who are suffering. It's not the Red Cross directors who are suffering. It is the poorest and the weakest and the oldest among us. As Hubert Humphrey once said, it's the people living in the shadows of life.
And it's disgusting.
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Former Congressman Joe Scarborough (R-Fla.) hosts “Scarborough Country,” 10 p.m. ET, weeknights on MSNBC. He is the author of the recently published "Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day : The Real Deal on How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Other Washington Barbarians are Bankrupting America". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.)Comment by clicking here. © 2005, MSNBC |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
