This event has made it painfully obvious that in a disaster situation, the people raised on welfare socialism will just sit helplessly on a bridge for days demanding that people raised on working class ideals come and save them. My question to the welfare socialists is: what kind of morbid perversity drives a person to place welfare housing in a known hurricane target in the first place?
As a graduate of Tulane who spent nearly 3 years in NOLA, the scenes if chaos this week didn't surprise me all that much. When you arrive for orientation as a new student, they give you a packet telling you that you're pretty much risking your LIFE if you drive into a project. A Tulane student is murdered just about every year, or at least that was the case in the 90's. Don't leave so much as a dollar BILL showing in your car, or it will be broken into. The crime, not to mention the squalor, of the projects - is mind boggling for students from suburbian America.
The poorest residents of NOLA basically just brought that level of chaos to the Superdome, as well as the city at large, after the flood. That certainly doesn't mean there weren't some heros in the bunch - people of character, like Jabbar Gibson, the young guy who stole the school bus and took a boatload of people to Houston. I met many wonderful black people in New Orleans, many of whom might have lived in those poor areas - but the sad fact is, the culture itself of the lower classes in that city is very scary, and the projects are absolutely frightening dens of drugs and murder (the city erected a huge billboard by 1 that said "though shalt not kill" - I guess to help remind them!)
Tucker Carlson is one of the only guys I've heard actually call it like it is when talking to Al Sharpton, arguing against the whole race card thing - saying something about how it's so obvious a fact that the poor don't have life as easy as the rich, that you don't even need to STATE it - "that's why nobody wants to BE poor!" - but as this article pinpoints, it's beyond just the culture of poverty we're seeing this week - it's a culture of EXPECTATION. Yeah I'm poor, my survival skills are minimal, and the government damn well better SAVE me, NOW.
I felt awful for the people of New Orleans as I watched this disaster - which was beyond just forseeable - the damn scenario was nearly charted to a tee by researchers and published in the Times Pic several years ago - but I wasn't all that empathetic to the people screeching at the top of their lungs that the government should have been delivering water, diapers, and food - to each and every citizen - a couple of days after the tragedy struck. I live in Anchorage - and if we get a 9.0 earthquake tomorrow - I'm not going to just wander downtown and scream "where's my WATER!!" and wait for the Feds to drop it in to me.
Something is scarily wrong when that big a group of people thinks that after a natural disaster, food and water should be at their feet within 24 hours. Open a history book, for &*#@*(% sake.
The media is ignoring everything from the incredible obesity problem, to the other problems these projects already HAD - in favor of trashing Bush, FEMA, and other officials (who I'm not saying did everything right - not by any means). We need to take a hard look at poverty in this country - and the culture that goes along with it. Does anybody ever remember seeing groups of 250 lb Indonesians angrily screaming "we need HELP!" after the tsunami?
Part of the article: People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
Thanks Governor Perry.
A curse!!!