The author is publisher of The NorthStar Network, where this article originally appeared.

Get Ready For the Wave of Destruction

Well it's here. After a tumultuous 2004 the New Year was ushered in with a natural disaster of Biblical proportion – an ocean borne earthquake that spawned a tidal wave, or tsunami, in the Indian Ocean that engulfed several nations along the Asian, Indian and African coastlines. With the death toll still mounting, the natural disaster quickly became the top story of last year and for all we know may be the leading news story of 2005.

In many ways the notion of being swept under by seemingly immovable forces seems apropos as a description of what many Black Americans are currently experiencing. Coming off a presidential election in which a majority of Americans took issue with the president’s decision to wage war in Iraq, and began to question Mr. Bush’s rationale for invading a country unprovoked by its government but still said moral clarity was foremost in their choice of candidate, Blacks appear to be lost in the wilderness; a forty-year leaderless sojourn coming as it does sandwiched between two symbolic anniversaries – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So as the United States commits close to a half billion in aid for the relief effort in Asia, as they should, I cannot help but be somewhat distracted by the ideological tsunami that has overwhelmed many Blacks in the United States. Last year we learned once again of the horrific consequences of so-called “tough on crime” laws as statistics revealed the aftermath: more than a third of all state and federal prisoners are Blacks and some ten percent of all Black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are imprisoned. Compounding incarceration rates has been the relentlessness of the Bush economy on Blacks seeking entry into the labor market. Double-digit unemployment, at rates twice that of whites, and long periods out of the workforce has come to be the experience of many Blacks under this administration. And there does not appear to be much good news on the horizon, not with the notion of a “jobless recovery” becoming widely accepted.

The undertow has also dredged up statistics that make clear the community’s poor health. Research reported at the end of the year revealed that almost 900,000 African-Americans deaths during a ten-year period could have been avoided had people received the same quality of health care as whites. It was a striking reminder of how racism has life and death consequences. Meanwhile, AIDS is ravaging Black America and taking a particularly harsh toll on heterosexual African-American women, a fact that exposed the ignorance of Vice President Dick Cheney during the vice presidential debate when he claimed to be unaware of this crisis. Trailing HIV/AIDS, but still of great significance for Blacks, is asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. And though often categorized as a criminal justice issue, gun violence is a public health crisis that has devastated Black neighborhoods throughout the nation.

As the 109th Congress convenes changes in the federal financial aid program for college students – the Pell Grant – will mean many young people will received reduced assistance, and some will be excluded altogether, at a time when many colleges and universities, public and private, are increasing tuition and fees. At the secondary level the maddening push for higher test scores is producing a generation of test driven drones who are ill equipped to fully exercise their God given intellect. And many urban school districts, under pressure from Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and suburban controlled state legislatures, are seeing little light at the end of the tunnel.

Then there is the matter of Mr. Bush’s war, courtesy of Rumsfeld Inc. Any sane assessment of what has transpired in the Persian Gulf region will call it for what it is – an unmitigated disaster. And an arrogance of power in the Oval Office and a complicit news media are to blame. Whatever happened to those weapons of mass destruction that Mr. Bush claimed we had irrefutable evidence of their existence? Where was that imminent threat in a country that obviously did not have a standing military strong enough to harm its neighbors or pose a grave danger to the United States? Where was the credible connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? And justifying this mess in the name of spreading democracy is laughable in a country where the process of electing of our own leader is now looked upon with suspicion by a large segment of the citizenry. The behavior of some of our military at Abu Ghraib prison and the U.S. Naval Base detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the resistance of many to reenlistment, and the outright opposition by some men and women in uniform is the legacy of this Rumsfeld-Cheney-Rice collabo. The Bush tsunami in the Persian Gulf has claimed the lives of almost 1400 American men and women military personnel, by all accounts over 100,000 innocent Iraqi children, and created a giant portal for terrorist activity in Iraq.

So now the wave is just three weeks from coming ashore in the nation’s capital as George W. Bush, in the irony of ironies, places his hand on the Bible and is sworn in for a second term. Caught in the current are thousands of Black families, parents struggling to make ends meet, children trapped in failing schools, young men enticed by the underground economy because legitimate opportunities are few and far between, and young women who are fighting for survival. And there appears to be little relief on the way for Black Americans, many of whom are continually swimming against the tide and some who will be swept up in the undertow.

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