Marie Antoinette 2005

Good afternoon to all,
hope your weekend is going well.

"Let them eat cake", was said to be Marie Antoinette's reply upon hearing word of peasants not even having bread to eat. Though there is controversy about those words being spoken or not, ol' Marie will be forever associated with her detachment from the people. Whether her detachment was simply due to her having lived a charmed life, living in the opaque glass bubble that was royalty, assuming that everyone had food or at least cake to eat should their bread run out, or if she was genuinely uncaring, we'll never know. Still, the public will forever remember her as such.

Now, back to present times, the aftermath of one of our nation's largest natural and man-made disasters, (I say man-made in reference to the situation being made worse by help coming far too slowly) here's one thing we can be certain was said:

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality."

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them,"

Once again, all these years later, we'll never know whether her detachment was simply due to her having lived a charmed life, living in the opaque glass bubble that is privilege (as we have no royals), or if she was genuinely uncaring. Unfortunately, the person who said them is no longer talking, our Marie Antoinette 2005.

Who was the person who said these things?
The person was none other than Former First Lady Barbara Bush, the mother of our current president, spoken while she walked the Astrodome complex amidst the rows of cots, with crowded conditions, little privacy, and people grieving over their losses, still worried about their future.

Could someone be so detached from the common folk, that they would actually believe a cot on the floor of a sports stadium is "working very well for them", compared to their homes, no matter how modest or small those homes might have been, simply because they are used to being poor? Or to say it's "scary" that they would want to stay in a state where they actually believed they were safe for a while. Or to even think that saying either of those things could even be perceived as acceptable?

As I sit here shouting to the wind, I guess it might be better if I just shut up and ate my cake, as I don't hear much being said about this story on the news. In time, when the details of this storm have become just a memory to most of us, I doubt much will have changed.

Here's a link to a good editorial that responds to the comments so much better than I ever could.