Let me first say that despite what you would be led to believe, our country and the region will, in all likelihood, bounce back from this disaster. Before long, Americans will be side by side with the people of the Gulf Coast helping them rebuild or relocate to get back on their feet and on with their lives. It’s what we as Americans do. It may not look like it now, but I think that things will return to a relatively normal state.
That doesn’t mean that New Orleans proper will ever be the same. I have my doubts about that. But as long as there’s oil just south of that city and a river running through it, folks will try.
Now, a lot of folks have a lot of different ideas about what happened, why it happened, and who should be blamed for the unmitigated disaster that is / was New Orleans, and I believe that there is more than enough blame to go around on this one.
Over the course of the next few weeks, months and even years, more will come out and we’ll re-evaluate what we thought we knew.
But as it stands today, the first person / group of people I’m blaming is the city of New Orleans, followed closely by the state of Louisiana.
Here is another article from Merritt Island, Florida Reporter that, if even partially true, is going to be very bad for the Mayor and Governor down there:
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I think all of Mayor Nagin’s pomp and posturing is going to bite him hard in the near future as the lies and distortions of his interviews are coming to light.
On Friday night before the storm hit Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center took the unprecedented action of calling Mayor Nagin and Gov. Blanco personally to plead with them to begin MANDATORY evacuation of NO and they said they’d take it under consideration. This was after the NOAA buoy 240 miles south had recorded 68′ waves before it was destroyed.
President Bush spent Friday afternoon and evening in meetings with his advisors and administrators drafting all of the paperwork required for a state to request federal assistance (and not be in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act or having to enact the Insurgency Act). Just before midnight Friday evening the President called Governor Blanco and pleaded with her to sign the request papers so the federal government and the military could legally begin mobilization and call up. He was told that they didn’t think it necessary for the federal government to be involved yet. After the President’s final call to the governor she held meetings with her staff to discuss the political ramifications of bringing federal forces. It was decided that if they allowed federal assistance it would make it look as if they had failed so it was agreed upon that the feds would not be invited in.
Saturday before the storm hit the President again called Blanco and Nagin requesting they please sign the papers requesting federal assistance, that they declare the state an emergency area, and begin mandatory evacuation. After a personal plea from the President Nagin agreed to order an evacuation, but it would not be a full mandatory evacuation, and the governor still refused to sign the papers requesting and authorizing federal action.
In frustration the President declared the area a national disaster area before the state of Louisiana did so he could legally begin some advanced preparations. Rumor has it that the President’s legal advisers were looking into the ramifications of using the insurgency act to bypass the Constitutional requirement that a state request federal aid before the federal government can move into state with troops - but that had not been done since 1906 and the Constitutionality of it was called into question to use before the disaster.
Throw in that over half the federal aid of the past decade to NO for levee construction, maintenance, and repair was diverted to fund a marina and support the gambling ships. Toss in the investigation that will look into why the emergency preparedness plan submitted to the federal government for funding and published on the city’s website was never implemented and in fact may have been bogus for the purpose of gaining additional federal funding as we now learn that the organizations identified in the plan were never contacted or coordinating into any planning - though the document implies that they were.
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It is the local government’s responsibility to have a feasable evacuation plan in situations like this. It’s not like anyone believed that there would never ever be a hurricane in the Gulf Coast area again.
So you’ve got a group of folks that constantly petition the feds for money for upgrades and what not, but then spend the money on casinos and other fluff. There’s even talk now that a proposed plan was a scam to get more money, was never implimented and the planned contractors had never actually been contacted.
These are the same folks that screamed from day one for the Feds to do something.
Secondly, I blame the people that stayed.
I know that sounds shitty. I know there are folks that couldn’t get out, but not nearly as many as the number that stayed. I read an interesting column today and here’s an exerpt. Actually, here’s the whole thing since I don’t want anything taken out of context:
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An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski Sep 02, 2005 by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can’t blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city’s infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists–myself included–did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster.
It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency–indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
“Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
“The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire….
“Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
” ‘These troops are…under my orders to restore order in the streets,’ she said. ‘They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.’ “
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. “The projects,” as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night’s television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of “the projects.” Then the “crawl”–the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels–gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city’s public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city’s jails–so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations–that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit–but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals–and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep–on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters–not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American “individualism.” But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider “normal” behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don’t sit around and complain that the government hasn’t taken care of them. They don’t use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
The welfare state–and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages–is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
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See, I understand trying to protect your stuff. But in the end, common sense has to prevail. Your house and TV and dishwasher and car aren’t worth shit if you’re dead. Once it was clear this storm was enormous (which was 3 days prior to striking when a buouy recorded a 68 foot wave just off the coast), the time to leave is now. Pack up the family, put on your best shoes, fill whatever you can pull with water, some food of some sort from the pantry, pack a bag or two of essentials, and get walking.
No, the bridge out of town wasn’t a great place to be either. It was hot and there was no food or water. But it was better than being neck deep in human waste, decomposing biohazard and chemical-filled water, waiting for no one to come.
The thing is, most of the folks that stayed just sat around assuming the government would take care of them like they always had. But the government can’t do that. They haven’t been able to for a long time. They can come in after the fact and write some checks, but that doesn’t help anyone when the wave hits.
And the idiocy that came after is unforgivable. The fact that a group of people (no matter how many were at the Superdome) didn’t have the sense to walk a distance away from where they were trying to sleep to urinate and defecate is beyond understanding. In the direst of dire situations, I would still keep my wits about me enough to know that you can’t shit where you eat and sleep. It’s that simple.
I also understand breaking into a grocery store for water, bread, diapers, formula and other life sustaining goods. But for every person stealing food, there were 50 shit-asses stealing box after box of Air Jordans, plasma televisions, luxury clothes and other worthless crap.
Worthless? Yes, worthless. Where the fuck are you going to plug in that plasma TV, dumbass? You’re walking around neck deep in a full and dirty toilet surrounded by nice architecture, and you won’t even put the TV down to keep the E-coli infested water out of your mouth.
Then there were stories of people shooting AT rescue helicopters and boats, and eventually of policemen being shot and killed. At that point, it was no longer a mission of mercy, but a police action.
I was in full support of the National Guard being under orders to shoot to kill, and I still am. Survival is one thing. That behavior is altogether another.
In the end, the whole thing makes me sad. Self-preservation is bred from a good upbringing, knowing the difference between right and wrong, being self-reliant, taking responsibility for yourself and your life, and doing the right thing, especially when no one is looking.
I only hope that these sights don’t somehow make Americans lose their collective belief that we are all in this together. Because believe me, it’s going to take every one of us to get through this disaster, and this won’t be the last one. Hopefully the next one will be handled better by the people AND the powers that be.
And before I go, here’s another footnote that should make folks sick. On Neal Boortz’s site today, I read the following:
Yesterday on the show I predicted that by the end of the week someone was going to be calling for the victims of Hurricane Katrina to be paid massive amounts of money, just as were the families of the victims of 9/11. Well … it didn’t take long. And just who was it that stepped forward to demand the victims compensation fund? None other than the NAACP. Yup, NAACP president Bruce Gordon is saying that a compensation fund for the Katrina victims should be the first order of congress. By the way, the NAACP didn’t call for a victim’s compensation fund after any of the four hurricanes that devastated Florida year. Draw your own conclusions.
Don’t believe it? Here’s the link:
http://www.naacp.org/news/2005/2005-09-06.html
Sorry this was so long, but there was good stuff to read and important stuff to think about as we move into the next phase of this disaster: The “I want mines” part.
What say you?