What they didn't need is a picture like this Ms. Tucker, so why don't you ask your demoncrat buddies why in the HELL they didn't deploy the 2,000 buses available in the city of NO!
Posted on 09/07/2005 8:04:44 AM PDT by madprof98
Here in America, the land of opportunity, we gave up on the poor more than two decades ago. Under the careful tutelage of Ronald Reagan and other conservatives, we learned that the poor were simply too lazy to improve their prospects and their misery was their own fault.
We gave up on the white poor and the black poor, even though black Americans had suffered under three centuries of unconscionable oppression before a brief period — less than three decades — when they began to be treated as fully human. We gave up on the Native American poor, though they had been the victims of a historic savagery amounting to a holocaust.
We not only gave up trying to help the poor, but we also bought the argument that trying to assist them, especially through government programs, would just make matters worse. After all, years of relentless right-wing radio have taught us that the poor are illiterate, sick and jobless because of government welfare policies — or because they choose to be. So we turned our backs on the impoverished and tuned them out, leaving them stranded in the worst neighborhoods, worst schools and the worst geography — next to landfills, on top of toxic dumps, in the swamps.
So the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — with its pathetic images of desperately poor people, mostly black people, stuck in New Orleans without food, water or adequate shelter after all the affluent people had fled — should come as no surprise. This is a natural consequence of a political and social culture that has decreed: You're poor? Why would anyone want to be poor? Tough luck. You're on your own.
In fact, The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune used just those words to describe the hurricane evacuation plan authorities put in place for residents who didn't own cars. Reporter Bruce Nolan wrote in July, "City, state and federal authorities are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation."
At least Nagin and his fellow city officials were trying to figure out how to get the poor out of town if disaster struck. Working with an anti-poverty agency and the Red Cross, they envisioned a private initiative, Operation Brother's Keeper, in which churches would enlist members with cars to offer rides to the have-nots.
By contrast, the ill-informed, incompetent Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is still puzzled by all those poor people who refused to order their chauffeurs to crank up the Bentleys. Last week, he told CNN:
"I think the death toll may go into the thousands. And unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the evacuation warnings. And I don't make judgments about why people choose not to evacuate. But you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there."
If you're somebody like Brown, it's awfully easy to forget that there are people too poor to have a car, a credit card or a checking account, people stranded outside the magic circle, people without friends in high places. With Brown's GOP connections, he landed a job at FEMA after he was forced out as so-called czar of the International Arabian Horse Association.
In fact, it's easy for all of us who live in relative prosperity to forget that most of us are here because we had the good sense to be born to the right parents. While a few impoverished young adults can still scratch and claw their way into the mainstream, it is getting harder and harder to do so as the industrial jobs that created the great middle class are disappearing. (Why do you think so many working-class sons and daughters volunteer for the U.S. armed forces?) Income inequality is increasing in this country; the latest census shows that the number of people living in poverty is rising.
Still, a few predictable voices on the far-right fringe are already thinking up ways to blame Hurricane Katrina's victims for their plight. Some are playing up the lawlessness of a few thugs, others are casting responsibility for the crisis solely on local authorities. Haven't we listened to those callous self-promoters long enough?
Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.
— Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays.
Why hasn't someone invested in a way to convey 50-60 people from one place to another with only one person operating that device. If there were such a miracle device, hundreds of them could be placed around the city. Then the mayor could write an emergency plan which relied on using these vehicles to haul tens of thousands of people out of the city with each round trip.
Too bad no one has ever created such a device.
LOL! I find it simply fascinating that Cynthia actually gets paid to write this stuff. Why can't I find a job like this?
And she manages to pull-off giving NO and Nagin a pass for abandoning the "poor" of New Orleans and stick it to Brown.
Man, she's good.
All very noble of us, but the ONLY reason we have a sizeable left wing democrat party in office today is the black vote. Without 90% of these liberal dems would lose. they know it and they will fan the racist fires every time. The GOP has never found the person who can call them out on it.
The solution is easy: One man one woman, married and faithful.
True enough!
It always amuses me when those who mock others' suitability for jobs -- in part because of the way they speak -- can't spell or use proper grammar themselves. Look at this thread.
Riding along in my automobile
My baby beside me at the wheel
I stole a kiss at the turn of a mile
my curiosity running wild
crusin' and playin' the radio
with no particular place to go
Riding along in my automobile
I's anxious to tell her the way I feel
So I told her softly and sincere
and she leaned and whispered in my ear
cuddlin' more and drivin' slow
with no particular place to go
No particular place to go
So we parked way out on ko-ko-mo
The night was young and the moon was gold
So we both decided to take a stroll
Can you image the way I felt
I couldn't unfasten her safety belt
Riding along in my calaboose
Still trying to get her belt a-loose
all the way home I held a grudge
for the safety belt that wouldn't budge
Crusin' and playing the radio
with no particular place to go
Brown's fault. He's white, y'know......
Half my family from Slidell is "displaced". They aren't whining, screaming at the Government, or asking for hand-outs.
What they didn't need is a picture like this Ms. Tucker, so why don't you ask your demoncrat buddies why in the HELL they didn't deploy the 2,000 buses available in the city of NO!
I know what you mean.
There are also those eligible for welfare or other government programs who REFUSE to take it. That tells you a lot about those people.
Two kinds of poor, I agree . . .
Time for a slander suit.
Unfortunately, the poor people in New Orleans were at the mercy not only of the weather, but of inept local politicians.
And an easy job that pays! Or else I'll riot and sell drugs!
Actually - I'll sell drugs anyway, and I'll randomly lash out in violence if you don't keep giving me your dollars on weekdays and your daughters on the weekends!
Actually, the shared (liberal) "conventional wisdom" is that any behavior by poor blacks is excusable because their forebears were slaves 150 years ago. The pictures and stories coming out of NO are so disgusting that this liberal myth is challenged (along with all the policies that flow from it). That is why the left is trying to shift blame to the Repbulican administration.
Apparently the writer hasn't been watching TV. Every single one of the houses they're air rescuing people from has one or more parked cars in the front yard.
Are you sure that those weren't Jesse's words.Listening to him speak sounds like the teacher talking on the phone to Charlie Brown.The good reverend seems to be getting dumber by the day.
Hell... I don't blame her for writing this tripe... the stupids & our elected Republican's still fall for it.
Yeah, haven't you seen all those 300-year-old former slaves interviewed on the History Channel?
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