Posted on 09/02/2005 9:49:33 PM PDT by Lando Lincoln
Two days. 48 hours. 2,880 minutes. This was all the time it took for the fabric of 6000 years of civilization to unravel in New Orleans. Streets which just last week were lined with the fans of Blues clubs and theaters are now patrolled by gangs of what in any other country would be called terrorists looking for their next innocent victim or store front to pillage. Rapes and gang wars in the Superdome, gun fire at rescue helicopters, and the efforts to search and rescue trapped survivors of hurricane Katrina have been abandoned in a near hopeless effort to restore some semblance of public order. Think of it. In just two days time, authorities have been forced to desert innocent people to almost certain death because New Orleans has become unsafe for rescue operations. Two days.
How could this have happened so quickly? Early reports of looting where portrayed by the media as desperate, hungry people breaking into grocery stores. In my opinion, this is not looting but survival. However, as the full scope of events has become clearer, it is evident that the mayhem in New Orleans is not a result of trapped residents trying to stay alive, but a carnival atmosphere where the bodies of the dead are pushed aside in order to steal their stereos.
I was originally going to write nothing about hurricane Katrina. Times of national tragedy are no time for partisanship. However, what is happening in New Orleans goes beyond the simple red state/ blue state debate. This disaster has exposed something putrid in our society. For this to happen so quickly indicates that there is something fundamentally flawed in our culture that should not be brushed under the rug by political correctness or blamed on any simple politician or political party. What is happening in New Orleans can and will happen again unless we take sober steps to first understand why these events have occurred, and then act to prevent them.
These are the politically correct facts as we know them. Almost everyone who could evacuate New Orleans before the hurricane did. Those who stayed where the very poor or ill who did not have the means to leave.
The reality is that the poor residents of the New Orleans could have evacuated the flood zone on a public bus before the hurricane for about the cost of a bottle of water. The total disabled population of New Orleans who might not have been able to evacuate is estimated at around 55,000 residents. So, the question must be asked why up to half a million people did not evacuate the city. The sad answer is that many of these residents remained because they where waiting for the government to aid them.
Many trapped in New Orleans right now are in a state of shock. They expected the nanny state which provides them with housing, medical care, food, and education to also come forward and provide them with the means of escaping a natural disaster. When a state of emergency was declared in August 26th , they waited. When the inbound lanes of the highways around New Orleans where rerouted outbound to allow for faster evacuation by road, they waited. If things where really that bad, the government would come through for them and tell them where to go, what to do, and provide the means to make it happen. Many residents in New Orleans remained because they have been so indoctrinated into the idea that they will be taken care of by the government that they are incapable to looking out for themselves.
Now the government has failed them. In a culture where all the comforts of life have been provided to people as entitlements, their sudden absence has unleashed a violent backlash against the society these people feel has let them down. In other words, if some people do not get what they feel they are entitled to get, then something unfair must have happened, so now they have the right to go out and take it.
Let me stress again, these people are not out just trying to get baby food and Grandma’s insulin. They are stealing electronics, guns, furniture, beer trucks, and Nikes. Along with the end of social service entitlements has come the end of the rules of behavior these entitlements require. So, if the government is not giving you anything, some of these people feel that they do not have to follow the laws of civilized society.
The nanny state has created a class of people in America not only unable to take care of their own needs, but incapable to existing within normal society. In your neighborhood, laws and peaceful coexistence are not maintained by government or the police, but by the people themselves. You obey the law and live a civil existence because you understand that this is the only way you will have a good life. You feel that way because you have worked hard and are unwilling to jeopardize everything you have earned by acting foolishly. But those who have always been given everything and told that everything they do wrong is a result of their being a victim, there is no similar prohibition.
New Orleans is a warning to us all. We must change our culture from one of entitlement to one of responsibility now, or we may have no culture left in the future.
Justin Darr is the Managing Editor of www.RepublicanVoices.org and a freelance writer living in the Philadelphia area. He is published in over 80 publications across North America, Europe, and in the Far East. Justin Darr is a proud member of the Moveoff Network http://moveoff.net.
Just read the Old Testament. HE can be that way.
It's just that I did not see any mention of 'wages' in your previous post.
True enough, but how do you explain the millions of Blacks in this country who have managed to overcome and are successful in their personal lives as well as business, in spite of the history that you site?
This is a worn out catechism, that may have applied in the late 60's and early 70's, but can no longer be used as an excuse for what is unfolding before our nation's eyes.
If all Americans, Black and White will be honest and see the situation for what it is, we will have to conclude that the poverty pimps (ala Jackson, Sharpton, along with all the other white Liberal enablers and politicians) are to blame for the lack of leadership in communities such these.
The Liberal Democrat Mayor and Governor are to blame, because they failed to act in any responsible way,to protect the most vulnerable within their community( the sick and the elderly), and they failed to protect the poor and down trodden constituency, of whom they also pander to for votes.
Well said. I couldn't agree with you more!
When I saw those submerged buses I also thought of Pearl Harbor...Anybody with common sense can see what happened here..yet the MSM rants about, "Bush did nothing"... Bush wasn't fast enough "...the "Poor" got screwed (class warfare)...the "Black Masses" were once again victimized by the "Evil Whites"(race warfare)
The press has a template that Bush must be portrayed as a dullard in any crisis..they did the same with 9-11... remember the Moore ticking clock crap? It's the same agenda.
One of the main things I thought, watching the looting and the complaining all week, was this is what happens to thise that wanted, voted for and lived in a "cradle to grave society."
Who is gonna evacuate me? THE GUUUUMMMMINT!
Who is gonna feed and water me like cattle? THE GUUUUMMMINT!!!!
Who is to blame for me not leaving when I had DAYS to do so?
THE GUUUUMMMMINT!!!!!
These people have just very nicely proven why liberalism does not work.
Those are school buses, each of which holds 70 people as opposed to city buses which hold 50. The city buses were parked in the NO public transportation garage. The important point is they are all still parked and are now submerged. This is all you need to know about the criminal ineptness of the mayor and governor involved. No wonder the Democrats are trying to blame Pres. Bush.
http://www.lwrri.lsu.edu/1998_2002WEB/downloads/New%20Orleans.pdfwhole
Americans of African descent were segregated and brutalized for a hundred years after slavery ended because of fear of the behavior we are seeing in New Orleans.
This was racist, since, as we have seen since 1955, many Americans of African descent, given the opportunity to thrive in a 21st Century, first world culture do so, and do quite well. Surely it was unjust to lump their parents and grandparents in with the ancestors of the looters and rapists of New Orleans, just because of skin color.
However, there is a remnant of the slave population which is NOT capable of integration, or even coexistence with, a modern society.
Of course, there is also white trash that is similarly situated.
However, the end of segregation permitted many Americans of African descent to flee the black underclass. They've moved to Long Island, and Prince Georges County, and elsewhere.
This has created the phenomenon of highly concentrated pockets of a stone age culture, one of which is being, you should pardon the expression, liquidated in the former New Orleans as we speak.
Nobody that I know has any idea what to do about this.
I feel a little sorry for the cities taking refugees. If the bad-apple nanny-state entitlment evacuees don't shape up (and it's not all of them but there's enough) it's going to be a mess.
LQ
Welfare is merely a system of slow genocide. In Canada, the once proud Native population has been largely reduced to gasoline-huffing youths and alcoholic adults by this essentially colonial and patronizing 'caring' state.
We know enough not to feed bears, so ignorance isn't the problem, imho, it's the lust for power, inspired by a contempt for humanity disguised as love.
I call it "Entitlement Rage"...and it is ugly.
Well, somebody had to say it.
From what I keep hearing it seems that the Texans are expecting them to find employment...
Thanks for posting this. We need more people making this point.
Nam Vet
Many residents in New Orleans remained because they have been so indoctrinated into the idea that they will be taken care of by the government that they are incapable to looking out for themselves.>>>>>>>>
In the dirt poor SC county where I went to public school we were taught that a person could be incapable OF doing something, incapable TO sounds like ghetto talk.
Apparently we're all just three meals away from anarchy?>>>>
Clean drinking water was definitely needed, and infants and small children needed supplies but the hunger factor for adults has beens greatly overstated. On at least two occasions I have deliberately gone for three days with no food and felt better for it, I saw one woman on TV complaining that they received only military meals with no way to heat them,"and you couldn't eat that". She looked about as hungry as I do and I just finished a steak.
And we're stocking up on dogfood for our Rottweilers and extra shotgun shells.....just in case these folks aren't the "model citizens" Governor Perry seems to think they are.
You have summed it up quite excellently and concisely. Sadly, no matter what happened in this situation, (or any other) President Bush will always be blamed.
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