Posted on 09/04/2005 4:23:28 PM PDT by ElCapusto
The haunting images of New Orleans were those of a Third World nation unable to cope with a natural disaster. The over-riding question in the first days following the hurricane was “What is the government doing?”
Americans have been conditioned to look to the federal government as the answer to all their needs. The federal government has steadily taken over our education and health care systems through vast programs that, in the former case, has ruined what was once one of the best in the world and, in the latter case, through Medicare and Medicaid, exercises control over the way the system works and who it benefits. Social Security has, for too many, replaced planning and saving for one’s old age.
When a portion of everything you earn is removed from your paycheck in order to pay for someone else’s senior years, how can you be expected to put aside money you don’t have to save, invest or spend as you wish? We have been required to turn personal responsibility for our lives over to “the government.” It sounds good on paper, but the reality is that Social Security is going broke and the interest level in the current administration’s effort to “fix” the system is so low the President’s efforts have been met with a significant measure of indifference.
The “government’s” response to the disaster that befell huge swaths of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama suggests that there are, indeed, limits to what it can do. It is, after all, composed of bureaucrats who must obey the thousands of regulations and laws affecting their agencies and that have been imposed on our national economy, affecting all the rest of us.
One of the first actions “the government” took was the Environmental Protection Agency announcement that it was suspending the idiotic mandates requiring countless different formulations of gasoline to insure that a sufficient supply was available nationwide. In one State after another, these mandates insure that different formulations are required in different areas of the same State.
Mandating the use of ethanol in order to insure a bounty of riches for corn producers while ignoring the need to drill for oil in Alaska or ignoring enormous off-short reserves and shale oil exposes the politics that over-rode the need for greater energy self-sufficiency and independence from a Middle East that largely hates America.
The looting and criminality that occurred in New Orleans also revealed the failure of not just local people, but much of the black community in America to take advantage of the protections and opportunities afforded by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation enacted since the 1960s. As Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, pointed out on September 2nd, “New Orleans is two cities, not one, according to census data---a relatively affluent, small, achingly lovely city that’s mostly white, and a poor, big, unlovely city that’s almost all black. Overall, the city is two-thirds African American; it ranks as the ninth-poorest big city in the nation. It is also one of the most violent cities in the country, now making a bid to reclaim the ‘murder capitol’ designation it held for many years.”
This is repeated over and over again in many of the nation’s cities, many of whom are also falling prey to the influx of millions of illegal aliens flooding across our southern border, bringing with them crime and disease, replacing native-born American workers for those jobs they might have had were it not for the low wages the illegals will accept.
The laws fashioned to protect and help blacks have brought about some improvements. A black middle class has emerged, but the evidence demonstrates that too many black Americans opted to remain mired in their own failure to take advantage of educational opportunities, continued to produce the one-parent families in which men were largely absent, and remained responsible for much of the crime in the cities. In return, they offered America a “gangsta rap” and “hip-hop” culture that reflects attitudes immune to the values shared by the majority of Americans. They were not marginalized. They marginalized themselves.
The physical losses in the affected areas will be rebuilt. Americans always rebuild after natural disasters, but the social problems are likely to remain unless and until we begin to shut our borders against what can only be called an invasion and until black Americans fully integrate themselves by taking more responsibility for their lives.
We all need to rely less on the “government”, but it seems unlikely at this point the government will allow that to occur. Congress is too in love with the billions it can seize for countless pork barrel projects “for the folks back home” and to insure reelection. There are too many people dependent on the socialist programs enacted after WWII. The mindless federal spending has been reflected at the state level while, at the same time, federal mandates have eroded state and local power.
We need to vastly reduce the vast matrix of economic regulations that suck billions out of the economy while creating obstacles to free market answers to our most pressing needs and, as in the recent Supreme Court ruling, destroy private property values with a ferocity matched only by natural disasters.
Life in America is going to get more expensive because “the government” claimed it could take care of us from birth to death. It can’t. It never could.
Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet website of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com.
© Alan Caruba, September 2005
http://www.sierratimes.com/05/09/04/alcaruba.htm
Agree! :)
Excellent book.
I distinctly remember them telling the people to go to the dome and 'TAKE ENOUGH FOOD AND WATER FOR 5 DAYS'.
Why were they without anything when the sun came out the first day?
Their fridges may have been low until the first of the month, but surely they had some bottles they could have filled with water.
The only questionable thing about this article is the title. Everything else rings true.
Ping to IGB.
You're the pinhead and will undoubtedly prove it somewhere down this page.
America is becoming a nanny state. More people SHOULD stop, look and listen before it's too late.
Nail meet head. This abject culture needs changing.
I believe what has to happen now is that we throw all of these problems into the face of the American people and explain that we have a choice right now. We can either continue on the "Save the world" course or we can relax some regulations and save the economy. The only other solution is to raise the standard of living relative to the new pricing of gas, food, lumber, energy, etc.
those pockets are in almost any large urban area and the savagery and depravity we have seen rivals what I have seen with my own eyes in Liberia and Haiti
we simply have to start repairing that with hard love and reject the accpetance and even celebration of an illegitimate fatherless thug culture...for all of us.
we have grown so soft
compare the depravity here with other past hurricanes
The US could easily have remained an outpost of civilization, the Mississippi Valley could have stayed unproductive, the East coast could have been a relatively poor market for European industry. That was the intent of many in the Europe of the colonial days as well as many in the former colonies after the Revolutionary War, and there were opportunities after the Revolutionary War for reversion to that situation. One way and another it all came together between 1820 and 1890 and America emerged as the number one industrial power on earth. Was that a temporary condition? Maybe.
"One couldn't help but notice the lack of fathers standing with their wives and children"
You know I had an interesing occurance happen in my family about 3 years ago. A friend of mine in an all white family married a black woman that already had three kids, all by black men none of whom married her or can even be found. My ex-wife was curious about her choice of marrying stock now that she was interested in settling down.
Her answer? "Black girls wanna have a good time? Get a black man to "Hook up and party with."
You want a man that will love you and take care of you and the kids? Get a non-black(she actually said white but I am creatively editing) man.
I did think it was very interesting that their was a lot of apparantly single men acting like asses, while an awful lot of single mom's sat around whining about their lot in life.
I was reading a magazine article in Reminisce. It was about the one room schoolhouse. Communities would pull together the funds. They would house the teachers. They had a definite hands-on approach. The parents had to be involved in one way or another. Before education was a government requirement it was considered a privilege to get an education.
If a celebrity wanted an Oscar, they might portray the shooters today who shot at ACOE contractors as minority disadvantaged workers who had the resources to compete for ACOE type contracts, but the democratic socialists had rigged the game to where they could never escape the lower class. Meanwhile, the only avenue of success visible to their community and family was to cow-tow to the democratic socialist gangsta structure that forever enslaves the black population.
In turn, middle class LEOs who were NOPD simply responded to the criminal act, resulting in a continuance of the socialist agenda.
If the American people were foolish enough to let the Left get its way, the New Oleans disaster would be nation-wide, permanent, and worse.
If Louisiana is third world, I'd hate to know what Hawaii is.
"those pockets are in almost any large urban area and the savagery and depravity"
Oh come on, you know if they had a monumental disaster in Detroit or Philadelphia, everyone would be sweet as sugar, dont 'cha....?? :)
Shouldn't this be titled.
Democrat administrations as thirdworld hell holes.
The bus issue is a hot potato. MSM is avoiding it. There is going to be scandal about this. Negligence. Maybe criminal negligence.
"In my family"
extended family
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