A Matter of Tone?


I've mostly given up on local television news, and why not, but for whatever reason I decided to tune in last night and caught this story (along with the story just below this post)--here's the local paper's version:

Hurricane Katrina victims picketed Wednesday in front of FEMA’s Baton Rouge office to protest what they say is the U.S. government’s unfair treatment of evacuees who live in temporary trailers possibly contaminated with formaldehyde.

The demonstration was prompted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s announcement last week that it would step up its efforts to move evacuees out of trailers because tests found high levels of formaldehyde in some of the temporary homes.

Several residents of FEMA’s Renaissance Village trailer park near Baker said the agency offered Feb. 14 to move them into a hotel room for 30 days.

Charlette McGee, a Katrina victim who recently moved out of a trailer and still advocates on behalf of current FEMA tenants, said many people have refused the hotel rooms because they see them as a step down from trailers, even if those trailers are potentially unhealthy.

"In a hotel, there’s no kitchen or refrigerator," she said. "There’s no sense of community. We want to go back to our normal way of living before Katrina."

Fair enough, and if you saw the video without sound, a normal reaction would likely be, "ok," and that's about it...but I couldn't help but notice the barely--and I mean thread-bare barely--disguised contempt in the tone of the local anchorperson. You could almost hear the expression "lazy n******" seeping through.

Well, that...or, since I'm feeling in a slightly generous mood, maybe it was the very idea that ANYONE would, god forbid, not be either working or "consuming" at Wal-Mart or McDonalds, but instead, exercising a fundamental American right to assemble peaceably and present their grievences. And it's not like they have no grievences to present. Hell, these people were abandoned by their country--the richest nation that's existed in human history. Abandoned.