Is Nashville Less Important? by Chris Keys

Is Nashville less important? By Chris Keys Author of “Reprisal! The Eagle Rises!” The Fishing Trip-A Ghost Story” and The Motor Home-God Does Work In Mysterious Ways!” due out summer of 2010.


The rain came down in buckets and the local rivers rose and rose to unprecedented levels in less than forty eight hours. Local residents claimed to have never seen anything like it and now it has created a state of emergency in fifty two counties. Central Tennessee and the greater Nashville area are for the most part under water.

The national weather service has stated that the area received more than 13 inches of rain in the two day period between May1 and May 2. So far the death toll has reached 21 souls. This is by far the worst flooding ever scene in the central Tennessee region and the water still has not receded.

The governor of Tennessee has asked for a declaration of a state of emergency by the Federal government and yet as of this writing, there has been little action from Washington, a total of four counties declared disaster areas. The fifty two counties in Tennessee, covers more than half the state and yet there has been no FEMA reaction team sent to the area that’s been reported. There are no government trailers being rushed in to house the roughly 100,000 have been left homeless and the downtown area of Nashville is underwater. The rough estimate of damages is $1.5 billion.

SO what’s going on? A week after Katrina happened there hundreds of billions allocated to help with the recovery and FEMA had over a hundred thousand trailers in route or on site already to help house the homeless, plus it was busing people to other cities to care for them. Yet in Tennessee, Obama has only declared four counties as disaster areas. Four out of the fifty two that Governor asked for.

The Governor is a Republican. The state voted against Obama in the 2008 elections and it’s a state strongly in favor of the constitution and the bill of rights. Are politics playing a roll in disaster relief? Congress run by the Democrats when Katrina hit, immediately passed bills providing hundreds of billions of dollars for the relief of the victims. Now congress run by those same Democrats, are staling the one bill introduced to provide supplemental funding to FEMA. What’s happening?

Are we now required to be a Democrat to receive help when there is a disaster? Do we need to have a corrupt Senator or Congressman who will funnel money back to the DNC in order to get funding? The accounting of the money fro Katrina is a mess. Lots of the money is unaccounted for, but it’s not media high profile story. Why not?

Why are the people in Tennessee being left to fend for themselves, when the Katrina victims supposedly have received billions. We all know about the Visa cards given the Katrina victims which were used for Plasma TV’s and other luxuries. But then, that isn’t the point, plenty of good people in Nashville have lost everything and yet our government isn’t providing the same level of response as it did for Katrina, their providing a lot less. The Media, which screamed bloody murder that the government response wasn’t timely enough or big enough, has made little of the lack of response to Nashville’s plight. Why? Isn’t the human suffering just as bad as it was New Orleans? Do the people in Tennessee deserve less help by some arbitrary standard? What happened to America taking care of American’s? Is it more important to help the people in Hati, than those who live here? Hati has been a corruption pledged country since its inception and yet the American Government immediately began throwing money and relief supplies within twenty four hours. Yet in Tennessee, they can’t be bothered to help more than four counties. What’s up with that? Seriously, what is going on? Why are we as a country, doing the bare minimum to help our own people? Chris Keys