Racism Has A Body Count

Racism kills people.  Generally speaking, it's tough to put an exact number on how many, though.  How many black people killed in police encounters were killed because of racism or police fears in an over-armed society?  Or for legitmate reasons?  We don't really know.  How many people of color die because of poverty and poor access to health care or because they live in "food deserts"?  We don't really know.

Every once in a while, we get some clarity on the number of people that racist attitudes kill.  We have that now in Puerto Rico.  Trump - bring the vile human shit stain that he is - was bragging about how Maria wasn't as bad as Katrina.  We now know it was twice as devastating.

But Geraldo and Shep Smith weren't on the streets screaming at their news headquarters.  There were no pictures of the bodies floating through the streets, because this was a different type of catastrophe.  This was a catastrophe that killed people over weeks and months of neglect.  Like Flint, Michigan, this is a story of slow motion devastation that doesn't film well on the evening news.  With Trump routinely tweeting outrageous things, with Mueller uncovering more and more corruption, with our government ping ponging all over the place as an impulsive narcissist drives the ship of state like a two-year old, it is difficult to focus on stories that lack the drama that an attention deprived media audience needs.

The needless deaths that the Trump administration's callousness, racism and incompetence killed should be as big a story as Katrina.  The Trump people didn't help these people because they were Puerto Ricans.  They helped the people of Houston and other disasters.  They did shit for Puerto Rico.

Conservatives love to rail against George Soros as a rhetorical counterweight to the Kochs, Adelson, the Mercers, the Scaifes and every other shady billionaire who read too much Ayn Rand.  If Soros was as evil as the GOP says he is, he should be flying Puerto Ricans to swing districts and states like Florida and Texas to register to vote.  They are American citizens, and they have every right to be furious at how they are being treated.