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I've been spending a lot of time watching and thinking about everything that's happened in New Orleans. I haven't gotten around to posting until now, but I spent a lot of time talking to family and friends about it. Not only governmental responses, but also individual responses.
I mean, what was the difference that made, say, the NY police and fire personnel run into the Twin Towers (where they knew in all likelihood they would die) but had the New Orleans police walk off the job and tell people "It's every man for himself"? How can the Mayor of New Orleans complain that the Federal Government failed, when he left hundreds of busses sitting, unused, when in the emergency plans they had been marked for use in the evacuations? The poverty rate in New Orleans was 28%, in a city of 484,674 that is 135,709 people without the means to leave the city by themselves -- even if they would trust the government or the weather reports enough to want leave.
In a city that had one of the highest crime rates (the homicide rate was 10 times the national average), one of the lowest cop to resident ratios (3.14 to every 1,000) and a history of police and civil servant graft and corruption, was the break down of civility really that unexpected? Those who could evacuate, did. That left a city of marginalized, oft-ignored and disaffected people at the mercy of the aforementioned criminals, abandoned by 60 percent of the what little police force there was.
It's got to be FEMA's fault that things went badly down there, right?
I mean, what was the difference that made, say, the NY police and fire personnel run into the Twin Towers (where they knew in all likelihood they would die) but had the New Orleans police walk off the job and tell people "It's every man for himself"? How can the Mayor of New Orleans complain that the Federal Government failed, when he left hundreds of busses sitting, unused, when in the emergency plans they had been marked for use in the evacuations? The poverty rate in New Orleans was 28%, in a city of 484,674 that is 135,709 people without the means to leave the city by themselves -- even if they would trust the government or the weather reports enough to want leave.
In a city that had one of the highest crime rates (the homicide rate was 10 times the national average), one of the lowest cop to resident ratios (3.14 to every 1,000) and a history of police and civil servant graft and corruption, was the break down of civility really that unexpected? Those who could evacuate, did. That left a city of marginalized, oft-ignored and disaffected people at the mercy of the aforementioned criminals, abandoned by 60 percent of the what little police force there was.
It's got to be FEMA's fault that things went badly down there, right?
