A question you should ask: how come there were so many people in one place making the same mistake?
You are right that it wasn't a bright thing to stay in New Orleans. I'd say they didn't have any picture of what a major hurricane hitting their city would do. Now the question: how could so many in one place be that uninformed?
The New Orleans school system is more shameful than most. It definitely doesn't train people to be imaginative or literate, but if I were on the school board in a city situated at the bottom of a bowl with water seething above it on every side, I would want every student to know exactly how much peril a hurricane would be and give them a graphic picture. Apparently, that wasn't being done. I know, I'm blaming government, again.
Now, without being informed, they probably had heard many stories about those who rode out a hurricane, great grandmas, great granddads, even modern day on TV networks. Being poor in NOLA is dull, they probably craved that kind of adventure, not at all visualizing why that would be different in modern day New Orleans facing a type 4 hurricane. (Great grandfather probably weathered a type 2-- they didn't have that scale then.)
I could imagine natives of the city who grew up there thinking right now what kind of leadership would have prepared and maintained their city that poorly? And they are probably thinking what I'm thinking at this point: where did their tax money go? Would they have lived there at all if they had known the scandalous level of negligence?
Your argument about stupidity can also be extended to more and more idiots: like who in their right minds would have owned property there? How dare they complain that their elected officials were that lethargic all those years, and now use our tax money to bail them out now. Nevermind that's exactly why their politicians were ostensibly taking a little more of their money.
Also, realize how hard it is to suspect your making a mistake when 250,000 of your immediate neighbors are making the same one. Cigarette smoking proves that. It wasn't like they had isolation to give them an afterthought.
Finally, no matter if they fucked up or not: when you're life is in danger, you're being murdered and raped, and you're sick, starving and thirsty, it isn't in human nature to get introspective just then. In our ancient ancestory, a tribe facing what those people were facing would very well massacre another tribe. And probably *eat* them.
And don't think it's easy for people to get sane once that level of rage has been released. They may very well know how much they fucked up, but to them that will be a different issue to them. They'll still hate the government's guts.
First, let me start with a few comments on the various threads below.
1. Just like after 9/11 we learned that FEMA perhaps should be more coordinated with Defense and other agencies, we've now learned that its also helpful for FEMA to have that nimbleness that comes with being an independent agency. Hindsight is 20/20. Politics aside, lesson learned. Yes, the FEMA Director decried the integration, but no federal agency director (or company division head) has ever supported being rolled into a bigger bureaucracy - even when they work.
2. Everything I've read suggests that the levees have been underfunded for decades and the Bush cuts are just the most recent. There was a project started in 1965 to enhance the levees post hurricane Betsy that has never been completed. Congressional records show that fuding for the levee work on Lake Pontchartrain dropped from $23 million in 1998 to $16 million in 1999.
Again, hindsight is 20/20. Every administration has a huge array of underfunded programs. Budgeting is about making choices and sometimes we get burned. Even the critics recognize that perfect levees would have only mitigated, not prevented the flooding.
3. Even as someone who occasionally sides with Bush, I am a little tired of the "we're doing everything we can" rhetoric when we're obviously not.
But, here's my alternative view. This unfortunately is another incredibly sad episode of people making bad choices and then asking the government to bail them out.
The way I've heard it, there are hundreds of thousands of people who decided to stay in the affected areas after repeated requests to evacuate. Now that those choices have gone awry, they complain the government isn't helping them. Jeez, I even read an article about how tourists - people who electively decided to travel there and stay despite the forecasts - are complaining that the government is ignoring them in their efforts to save the locals. The nerve!
Yes, the ability to evacuate is partly limited by economics. But, any family with a car and a tank of gas could have driven 50 miles north and survived. Actually, they could have done 8 round trips and saved 7 carloads of friends. Plus, had all those who could have evacuated left, the number of refugees would be far more manageable.
Jeez, even Brett Favre's parents decided to stay when, with his money, they could've charted a 777 to take them north. On the other hand, I have a good friend here in Chicago who's parents live in Bay St. Louis. First sign of a huge storm and they drive/fly/do whatever to get north. Yes, their house is ruined and yes, it will take years to recover, but they are alive and we can focus our limited resources on saving their neighbors and rebuilding.
I don't mean to be insensitive about the victims, diminish the tragedy, or deny the government's role in bailing them out. That's the big story. I just felt someone needed to say this.
-- Modified on 9/2/2005 10:53:49 AM
I agree, to a point. Every one of these disasters has some element of people not being warned quickly enough, or not heeding that warning. Some can't; others just don't. I've made some of that type of bad decision in my life, and thankfully came out OK, and without the government bailout.
I've questioned why people build in harm's way, but they do. It's made simpler by the knowledge that Uncle Sammie will rebuild what's destroyed, but I'd guess most people would rather not go through it, given the choice.
I heard a comment on CNN last night by some muckity muck with FEMA. He claimed that they modeled the worst case scenario, and had a plan... but they weren't prepared for a one-two disaster punch of hurricane / levy break. I understand that he's a politician, and that by definition they speak out their ass. Even so, how could you claim to look at WORST case, and have something worse happen? Especially when there are piles of documentation regarding the Corps of Engineers determination that the walls were compromised. You could decide that their failure would be unlikely, but a worst case scenario would have to consider the city flooded as it is now.
That's not about which politician cut funding. That's about FEMA f-ing up big time. If Bush wants to save any credibility, the guy at the top of FEMA must go. Failures almost always fall uphill. If Bush can't pull the plug, maybe we'll have to. These guys messed up, and people are dead in the streets because of it.
Thanks for a thoughtful and apolitical response. This seems like an unfortunate combination of shitty things: a high risk area, a chronically underfunded infrastructure, a worse than reasonably expected event, and an apparently slow response.
Before we trash FEMA or the Feds disaster readiness, remember that the ACE group that looked at New Orleans basically suggested that protecting the city for a Cat 4 was prohibitively expensive and no administrator of FEMA head probably would've footed the bill. I'm not as frustrated with our work prior to Katrina as I am with the post-Katrina performance, but hopefully that story isn't over yet.
I'm less optomistic than you, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
life necessities. And you continue to attempt, abeit clandestingly, to defend the Bush Administration.
You write of looking forward to a brighter day. Have you contributed anything but hot air to the disaster relief? If you have done something concrete, then my sincere apologies. If you have not, then shut the F___ up.
I just contributed $1,000 to a friend's relief fund. That's in addition to several other donations I've made to other good causes. What have you contributed?
I never defended the Bush administration. I'm just looking objectively at the event and not trying to use it to prop up my already determined viewpoints.
basis. I will show difference to you from now on, you appear to at least walk some of the talk.
It is amazing how the apologists here and in the government try to dress up their bullshit as logic. The simple fact is, people will stay in their homes unless governments make a concerted effort to convince them otherwise.
Your point on modeling the "worst" cases scenario is a direct hit on the apologists. How in the hell can anyone logically model a worst case scenario without remotely considering all worst cases happening at one time.
Of course the apologists trot out cuts in funding. Cuts happen for many reasons, but $16 Million is still far better than nothing.
reactions to these warnings through middle class eyes. The fact is that 25% of the population of New Orleans lived below the poverty line. Yes, some people decided to ride out the storm, but these poor people had no choice. Many did not have cars. If you leave your house you have to find a place to stay like a motel. If you have no money or no credit card, you cannot get a room. The only option given to people too poor or too old or too weak was to go to the Superdome or the Convention Center. If you couldn't pay your way out of the city, you were stuck.
Honestly, I have never seen so many people trying to blame the victims of a natural disaster before. It is truly unseemly.
me. I would love to have some of the living relatives of those victims meet them face to face to have them explain themselves.
Another point you could have made re the levees is that this type of common sense spending is almost always, and with zero knowledge it seems, denounced as pork barrell spending. Well, a lot of people are literally wallowing in mud right now.
Just another example of how basic infrastructure in this misguided country is allowed to decay and rot and fall into ruin until a disaster comes our way to open our collectively stupid eyes, for a couple of seconds.
Emergency planning? For a country this size, with it's zillion and one interconnected nodes ,ANY disaster planning of any type seems to be an illusion. I'm not an ancient unreconstructed Cold Warrior but I wonder how differently these disasters might turn out IF we had had a 50 year experience of serious planning for civil defense as a consequence of the nuclear arms race. Here's an odd situation where something we refrained from doing MAY have come back and bitten us in a totally unpredictable way?
a majority don't have a friggin car to put gas in
the thing is
this was a mandatory evacuation
if it was so friggin mandatory why weren't the government going PRIOR to the storm, house to house, with buses and forcibly GETTING the people out of there?
and to quote someone
"You have to go and see the people who live in poverty, talk to them, see how they live...when people are suffering the way that people in new Orleans do Every Single Day...there's a problem. You cannot escape classism or racism. It is simply irresponsible to give ppl your filtered version of New Orleans.
Think about it: in New Orleans it's something (I do not have exact numbers at the moment) like 70% black and 20% white however 80% of the white ppl control all the business and the wealth in the city. Yeah that's a problem...its called racism AND classism.
This kind of blind ignorance makes me very sad. Some of these ppl really believe they can never ever have better...this is what their grand parents knew and this is all their children will ever know. Ask why it is that in New Orleans you see so many ppl looting and acting a fool and on the gulf coast...not so much. It hadn't occurred to you that something very different is going on in New Orleans?
so when 30000 black ppl are drowning in new Orleans because they were too fucking poor to leave and it take 4 days to get them help. Don't tell me it’s got nothing to do with race and class. That is why what you've so aptly called 'civil unrest' has occurred. These ppl have suffered a social injustice and they are pissed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not in any way saying looting is ok...I’m just saying try living in a housing project...unable to get a decent job because you never finished high school because no one was there to tell you if you don't go to school you'll never be able to get a good job and you'll end up dependent on the government that failed you. Seems like common sense? Maybe...maybe not. And why is it the majority of ppl living in poverty in new orleans are black? You have to think about these things...you have to be more critical...You have to challenge these banal and traditional ways of thinking. truth is just perspective.
Having said all that...I mean no disrespect and I apologize if I sound like a condescending bitch.
But you and I are not stuck in a shit filled convention center begging for help. I'm not sure what I’d do if I were in that situation...no home, no food, no water, no money and no help in sight.
That's not simply opinion though. For decades the school board of new orelans has been stealing money from these poor kids. Denying them the education they deserve. New Orleans provides a very large amount of the whole state tax yet they recieve the worse public school system and social services. Like Mayor Nagin said drugs ran thru the city freely and it was scary.
It's a shame that a natural disaster like this had to hit my city just so that the whole nation will realize how horrible the situation was down there. Hopefully, this doesn't not blow over in the news. Hopefully, they can give my people a since of security that the local police have not been able to offer for a very long time. Criminals ran the streets, corrupt people stole millions of dollars from the school system and no one care up until about a year ago, the people are very ignorant because they couldn't get the moral support they needed to finish school.
The situation down there was bad. That is not opinion it is fact. It was the way of life down there.
67% of the population of New Orleans is black. About 15 years ago all of the white people just upped and moved out of the city. Since then it's gone down hill it ain't even funny.
Like i'll keep saying to everyone i get a chance to talk to, i can't believe something like this had to go and happen for people to realize what is happening.
It's not coinsidence that all of those people are black it was ment to be that way. The white people of LA want to keep them there and it's unfortunate that for years they've been neglected and now they're left to die by the hundreds in a mater of days.
This is such an emotional moment for me because people just don't understand how bad the city was before this happened. I know this for a fact because i was born and raised in New Orleans, went to their public schools, lived in the ghetto, those people are my friends and neighbors. That was my community and now it's drowning and may never be the same.
Wish the media would start covering that more and it seems they slowly are.
I can't really talk anymore this all just breaks my heart. Don't even know why i'm bothering typing all of this but maybe it will help.
http://www.wonkette.com/politics//nagins-nightmare-full-transcript-123683.php
A question you should ask: how come there were so many people in one place making the same mistake?
You are right that it wasn't a bright thing to stay in New Orleans. I'd say they didn't have any picture of what a major hurricane hitting their city would do. Now the question: how could so many in one place be that uninformed?
The New Orleans school system is more shameful than most. It definitely doesn't train people to be imaginative or literate, but if I were on the school board in a city situated at the bottom of a bowl with water seething above it on every side, I would want every student to know exactly how much peril a hurricane would be and give them a graphic picture. Apparently, that wasn't being done. I know, I'm blaming government, again.
Now, without being informed, they probably had heard many stories about those who rode out a hurricane, great grandmas, great granddads, even modern day on TV networks. Being poor in NOLA is dull, they probably craved that kind of adventure, not at all visualizing why that would be different in modern day New Orleans facing a type 4 hurricane. (Great grandfather probably weathered a type 2-- they didn't have that scale then.)
I could imagine natives of the city who grew up there thinking right now what kind of leadership would have prepared and maintained their city that poorly? And they are probably thinking what I'm thinking at this point: where did their tax money go? Would they have lived there at all if they had known the scandalous level of negligence?
Your argument about stupidity can also be extended to more and more idiots: like who in their right minds would have owned property there? How dare they complain that their elected officials were that lethargic all those years, and now use our tax money to bail them out now. Nevermind that's exactly why their politicians were ostensibly taking a little more of their money.
Also, realize how hard it is to suspect your making a mistake when 250,000 of your immediate neighbors are making the same one. Cigarette smoking proves that. It wasn't like they had isolation to give them an afterthought.
Finally, no matter if they fucked up or not: when you're life is in danger, you're being murdered and raped, and you're sick, starving and thirsty, it isn't in human nature to get introspective just then. In our ancient ancestory, a tribe facing what those people were facing would very well massacre another tribe. And probably *eat* them.
And don't think it's easy for people to get sane once that level of rage has been released. They may very well know how much they fucked up, but to them that will be a different issue to them. They'll still hate the government's guts.
without snark. The majority of these people had nowhere to go. Many made from $8,000 - $12,000 per year. Everyone they know lived in the community. If they had a car, where would they have gone? We are talking about poor families with kids, sick and elderly people. They cannot afford a day, a week or two or 1 1/2 years in a motel. Leaving was not an option because the order for "mandatory evacuation" did not include a contingency for the poor, sick and destitute. They did not even evacuate the premature babies in the incubators at the hospital. The only ones who left were people who could afford to leave.
Also, just wait until October when people who are not as rich and powerful as Trent Lott but still had enough money to leave start running out of money. Let's see if they'll regret that Bankruptcy Bill that goes into effect on October 1.
I know that your heart is in the right place but I will not accept even marginal acceptance of these attacks on the victims of this tragedy. It was offensive during 9/11 and it is offensive now.
I know this because I got my bankruptcy in now.
I agree with you, but Answer made an in exception for those too poor to leave, remember? I wasn't giving acceptance, I accepted that it was clearly wasn't relevant due to that exception.
One thing I forgot to say is I find him unfair to the tourists who tried to ride it out. How the hell could they have known how terribly unprepared New Orleans was? I mean, supposedly, this wasn't a third world country they were visiting. This was the world's superpower, and one of our crown jewel tourist attractions.
If they survived, with the rest of the world, they are appalled at how dumb Americans are, and how willing we are to use callousness to excuse our negligence and stupidity. They have graphic stories to illustrate it now back home.
But mere embarrassment and loss of status is the least of our problems now.
-- Modified on 9/3/2005 12:08:02 PM
that making a big deal out of the vast minority--those that stayed behind because they felt like it--is being used as a deflection of the real crime here. Had those people left, there still would have been a major catastrophe because by far, the vast majority could not leave.
This "blame the victim" argument is a concerted tactic being spun by the Bush apologists. If we want accountability and competence to retun to government, we cannot let this offensive rationalization receive any credibility--no matter the subtelty with which it is presented.
The other interesting thing is that it seems that those that "chose" to stay there are now getting the opportunity to cut in front of the lines of evacuees to get out.
One last thing, OT. It is a sad day in America when I feel the urge to say congratulations to someone for getting their bankruptcy filed in time. Be well.