Welcome to the Bushville Era...

Most of us will not personally remember the "Hoovervilles" of the Depression Era, but for those who have had history (pre "no child left behind" curricula), the comparison between them and these new "forced separation camps" (necessary due to the incompetence of the president and the administration) is eerie. An even more frightening comparison can be made - between these new camps and the Nazi concentration camps (in the beginning, weren't the Jews taken to such camps "for their own good"?).

Please read below, but basically, evacuees are being put behind fences on college campuses, with limited access to media. Evacuees are being put on planes and not being told where they are going - i.e. Salt Lake City, or - very extreme - Puerto Rico. I wonder if husbands and wives are not allowed to sleep together, if the people are divided up "men and women"...

This is from a great journalist blog, Spelunking Through the Chaos:

Welcome to the Rockies, now get behind the fence!

I was afraid of this. As the great diasporas of New Orleans continues with evacuees not being told where they're going until the bus/plane cranks up or until they land/arrive, the police state tactics of some of the 'welcoming' communities are actually just housing people at remote locations, behind fences - like prisons, really. Look at the photo of the two women - Verne Stovall and Jacquelyn Augustine - at the right. According to a report in the Denver Post today, headlined "Evacuees stories moving, but fence isn't," written by Post columnist Diane Carman, really shocked me with her opening paragraphs:

If I didn't know better, I'd have thought I was peering through the fence at a concentration camp.
The signs on the buildings say "Community College of Aurora," though for now they're serving as an impromptu Camp Katrina. About 160 hurricane survivors are being housed in the dorms, surrounded by fences, roadblocks, security guards and enough armed police officers to invade Grenada.
There's a credentials unit to process every visitor, an intake unit to provide identification tags and a bag of clothes to every evacuee, several Salvation Army food stations, portable toilets, shuttle buses, a green army-tent chapel with church services three times a day and a communications team to keep reporters as far away from actual news as possible.
It probably was easier for a reporter to get inside Gitmo on Tuesday than to penetrate the force field around Lowry.

I mean if you read the story, the evacuees are very thankful for being safe and in a new place. Still, do we want to treat fellow Americans like this? And why so far away in Colorado? One woman says she's never even been outside of New Orleans and that's a pretty common thing among New Orleans' poorer residents.

I saw a report yesterday where evacuees were put on a plane and not told they were heading for Salt Lake City, Utah until they began taxi-ing down the runway. And then there is that report I have noted in recent days of the 1,000 evacuees flown to Roosevelt Roads naval base on Puerto Rico's eastern tip. What of them? I've still seen no reports, but I confirmed it with a Puerto Rican friend of mine. This is too surreal. As for forcing Americans into a fenced-in camp? I don't like it. Not one bit.