Katrina

Yeah. Wow. Thank you for that story, and for your service. Ummm, you might want to take ten-days of antibiotics just as a precaution.
Two comments struck me. yours, that our society might be in real trouble.. and someone else's about how the whole country is coming together to aid in the crisis. Maybe.
Let me clarify- there is a huge, huge outpouring of charity, and I don't mean to demean that in anyway. It is truly amazing to see the length people are going to help.
At the same time, I hear from some friends that as many as a thousand displaced people are being moved to a National Guard base here in New York... and my friends' much less than pc views have been fanned by rumors:
Let me say, I have no intention of debating the veracity of these rumors. It's not the point. I repeat them only as examples of America 'coming together' in a crisis.
"The crime rate in Houston has skyrocketed since 'these people' were moved there and the media isn't reporting it"
"The government is dispersing 'these people' as fast as possible because it's not safe to have them all together,"
"The government is dispersing 'these people' as fast as possible so they won't return to New Orleans"
(Actually, I think the government is dispersing former residents of New Orleans as fast as possible so that when cholera, typhous or whatever else breaks out it will be an 'isolated incident.'- how's that for paranoid!)
"All their kids are going to overwhelm our schools"
"They're going to be all over our streets with nothing to do"
"They're going to overwhelm our social services"
Ad nasuem. Equally distrubing are the rumors from 'the other side:'
"The government's failure to responed quickly enough was based on racisim"
"The government is trying to enlist as many of these people as possible in the Army"
"FEMA and everyone esle are just trying to shuffle us around because they don't have enough money"
"FEMA and everyone esle are just trying to shuffle us around because they're racist"
"Whites are being given better housing, more money, etc"
"The press called blacks 'looters' and said that whites were 'scavaging' and 'resourcesful.' (Ok, actually I know this is true, the media did. Nice job, guys. Then again, taking food is scavaging; Taking jewelry and TVs, er that would be looting. )
"The word 'refugee' is racist." Grrr. The word refugee means "one seeking refuge." Why the press let themselves be bullied into using euthanisms instead of proper English by people saying "We ain't no refugees" is beyond me.
" C. Ray Nagin is qualified to be mayor of a major city." There are basically no qualifications for being mayor of a major city. Secondly, this guy is an idiot- witness his invitation to the citizens of his former city to come back to a hazardous waste site on the scale of Bhopal: New Orleans Caution No food. No water. No sewers. No electricity. No 911. No brains.

OH, and my personal favorite, which started as a joke on the Howard Stern radio show: "You don't see any able-bodied men among the displaced because they used special helicopters to pick them up and bring them to Iraq"
You just know that some media outlet is going to pick up and put on the wires as a story.

Again, I won't argue the merit of any of this, there's no point.

I bring them up to demonstrate why I believe that this country has not been this polarized since the Civil War. This is made demonstrably worse by so many of the poor believing that they are entitled to having what the rest of America has or more, and the rest of America believing that it is personal failure that makes people poor, and that any social programs that will actually lift people out of poverty will negatively affect them.

What has me absolutely terrified now, is that President Bush, in his speech the other night. Has promised the moon- basically saying 'Oh crap, we got poor people here- we're going to fix that.'
Um... we've got a lot of poor people here. Granted, the poorest of the poor here are a #### of a lot better off than most everywhere else in the world- Look at everything we have to throw at Katrina, imagine it happening in some under-devloped nation where all the refugees would have nothing to be evacuated to?
Anyway, lots of poor people. Here. Hard to fix But we're the greatest nation on earth. So we're going to fix it.
Um, Mr. Bush, what happens when all the poor angry people get too tired of waiting for the government to fullfill your promises?
/SOAPBOX

	Author	Topic: Katrina (Read 19195 times)
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