Posted on 09/03/2005 6:54:45 AM PDT by RKV
The disaster of New Orleans, unspooling minute by minute on our TV screens, has been wrenching - in one particular way even more gut-twisting than Sept. 11.
You could watch the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and feel horrified at the sheer violence and destruction of it; angry at the murderous evil of Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers; heartbroken at the awful suffering and loss. But there wasn't any cause to feel embarrassed and ashamed.
Those are the emotions evoked by sights of the massive lawlessness in New Orleans in the days after the storm and the inability of anyone to stop it. Katrina unleashed a catastrophe of nearly unimaginable proportions, confronting government at all levels with enormous challenges. That the reaction to the hurricane initially seemed uneven and slow is understandable, but even allowing for the hellish circumstances, the breakdown in civil order has been stunning.
Without order, which government exists to protect, nothing else is possible. Not even rescue operations, as New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has learned. On Wednesday night, as the city descended into an urban dystopia straight out of the 1981 film ''Escape From New York,'' he had to command nearly all the city's 1,500 police officers to focus on re-establishing law and order instead of saving endangered people.
Everyone understands desperate people getting food or water by any means possible. Plundering tennis shoes and TVs, as a small thuggish minority has done, is another matter. And the problem is that there is no such thing as a little chaos. Once a climate of disorder is set, it has a logic of its own. First, it was stealing tennis shoes, then it was taking potshots at a helicopter arriving to evacuate people from the Superdome. Goons stole a bus from a nursing home and threatened its residents. Rescue workers report that rocks and bottles have been thrown at them and shots fired their way.
Unfortunately, the urban revival that had swept much of the country mostly left New Orleans behind. The atmosphere of lawfulness that stood New York City in good stead after 9/11 and during the 2003 blackout - although those were much less far-reaching disasters was never established. The city never had a Rudy Giuliani. Even as murder rates continued to decline in other cities in recent years, the murder rate in New Orleans crept up. The police were plagued by allegations of corruption and brutality, and, according to The Associated Press, only had ''3.14 officers per 1,000 residents - less than half the rate in Washington, D.C.''
Law enforcement, of course, is primarily a state and local responsibility, but in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, people look to the federal government and the president to solve any problem on their TV screens. Already the question is being asked if the feds could have jumped in sooner (the National Guard is now arriving in force). If President Bush pays a political price for the images of lawlessness that have played out in New Orleans, it will be the second time looting has hurt his cause.
The other, of course, was in Baghdad in 2003. It is a matter of consensus now that the rip-the-place-apart looting in the initial days after the fall of Saddam Hussein set the occupation off on the wrong foot. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained the looting away at the time as the natural exuberance of a newly liberated people. One wonders: Has anyone in the administration read their Hobbes? Or does he not make the ''compassionate conservative'' reading list?
New Orleans has provided a corrosive lesson about government. At all levels, government is overbearing and nagging, paying for people's prescription drugs and telling us whether we can smoke in restaurants or not. But when it comes to its most elemental task of maintaining order and protecting property, it might not be up to the task when it is needed most.
Keep that in mind and buy a gun, just in case.
Which country is that? I want to move there.
But they would have had to walk all the way out of town to get some other kind of food.
Reminds me of a cartoon I drew once of two rescuers getting to the site of where an airplane full of soccer players went down and the survivors are all gorging themselves on the remains of the dead. The one rescuer turns to the other and says "WTF! It just crashed 5 hours ago!".
LOL! the only post I asked the mod to remove from this thread was my own comment!
Our? The US?
More like proof that the socialist state of LA does not work on ANY level. None.
I really didn't think it was a gesture of gross stupidity, however; a little indelicate perhaps, but the assinine notion of New Orleans-flavor manmunching deserves such a post, and you provided it.
Thank you!
Don't know, but it raises several questions if so.
1. Why is it just black people?
2. Are they eating just black people or just white people or both?
3. Are they killing people to eat them or just eating the ones who are already dead?
4. Which is better, dark meat or white meat?
5. Does it taste like chicken?
6. Raw or cooked?
How true. But in NO it seems to have heavy concentrations in some places. I don't think this behavior was found in Goshen, 1965 - looting, shooting at rescuers, cursing those from both government and citizenry who were trying to help.
Go to that thread and quit bugging us.
Please accept my apologies for being less than Christian in my response but I have a lot of Family in NO that are wonderful people and are there now. They are trying to help...I have enjoyed and agreed with many of your posts. Again my apologies for my quick reaction.
Wrong, it's a **local** disgrace.
What a great cartoon! Can you post it on this thread? I laughed out loud just reading this. It'd be fun to see!!
'Inquiring minds want to know'.
I understand what you're saying, and I agree with you. However, there's another issue involved here: This is the result of the Welfare State, biting NO in the butt.
The gangsters have largely been raised by other gangsters, with a totally insufficient parental influence in their lives. This happened because of the Welfare State, which bases welfare and other payments on the lack of a father in the home, and on the lack of a family income.
So, yes, the gangsters themselves are to blame, but their lawlessness is on the tail end of a State mandated cycle. Even so, they, the gangsters, should be held totally responsible for their actions, regardless of this welfare cycle. Clear?
It was not the job of "anyone" to stop it. It was the job of the New Orleans police, led by the mayor. Riots are easily scotched in their earlier stages, but very difficult to stop when they have been permitted to get out of hand.
WHY WASN'T MAYOR NAGIN IN NEW ORLEANS FOR THIS CRISIS? You didn't catch Rudi Giuliani abandoning New York in the crunch. Why wasn't he there giving orders to the police?
If the New Orleans police were incompetent to keep order, why didn't Mayor Nagin put someone in charge of them earlier who could have straightened things out?
Because, as people have pointed out on other threads, he had no interest in governing the city, but only in having a good time collecting graft, as politicians in Louisiana have traditionally done. That's always easier if law enforcement is lax or nonexistent.
But when the crisis comes, these guys bug out--and blame others for their own deficiencies.
No, it's not. This is a nation of nearly 300 million people, and the only ones responsible for the chaos and disorder in New Orleans are that small number -- 100, 1,000 or even 10,000 who are committing those crimes.
I'm willing to bet that most people who look upon the lawlessness in New Orleans as a "national disgrace" are those who were profoundly disappointed this week to learn that they actually live in a country where that kind of sh!t goes on. Some of us had no illusions about what New Orleans, Detroit, South Central Los Angeles, etc. are all about.
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