23 & Hurricanes

On Saturday I turned 23. It was a great day. We went up with some friends to do some horseback riding in Big Bear (which was great) got some jerky from the "House of Jerky" in the Village up there, then came back and had a BBQ in the TriCity Park in Placentia/Fullerton (I don't know the third city...). It was a great day. And during the drive up to Big Bear I finally got a chance to release a rant about the situation in New Orleans in such a way that I was able to come to some firm conclusions...which I now feel able to put down in words here.

Katrina. She caused some real problems. Its tragic, and aside from the serius, obvious pains that it inflicted (deaths and injuries) it cannot be overstated that losing your home is a hard thing to live through. I lived in the Philippines, remember--I know what real storms can do. California's big record breaking 30 odd inches of rain in a year is what falls in the first hour or so of the typhoons back home. We lived, generally, in better areas, and we still had to leave our home once for a storm--though we didn't lose everything, what we did lose was hard to let go of, and the aftermath was definately no fun. I say all this to ensure that its clear...I understand the plight and have sympathy for those who have lost, some much more than simply everything they own, but even loved ones. Its a devastating thing to survive.

However...that doesn't mean that most of the skepticism is warrented. Here are some facts that people seem to be overlooking as they respond to the devastation of Katrina's wake:

1. Storms are unpredictable...and we had no way of knowing this would be the way it was till it was too late. Predictions don't count as a sure thing.

2. We're at war--whether you like it or not, that means that the nation's resources have many different needs to meet. This means priorities and sometimes things don't work out the most convenient way we hope they will. This means that we may chose not to spend money in some areas that seem like less of a problem and we have to hope, to some extent, that that's the right decision. It would irresponsible to spend money that needs to be spent elsewhere on preparing for the possibility of a natural disaster which we cannot control. In otherwords, if Bush had ordered everything to be ready to rush to New Orleans and Katrina had simply died out or hit Mexico or whatever, we would today be complaining about his tendecy to over-react or some such nonsense, and we would be saying he should be focusing on the problems we were obsessing about last week. We cannot do everything all the time. Its just a fact.

3. Even in a first world nation, its unreasonable to expect the devastation of this kind of scenario to be resolved. It still takes time, even here, to fix a city that's literally uninhabitable presently.

4. Like it or not, people stayed in New Orleans. They were warned. Even they didn't expect it to be as bad as it was...and that's just the gamble they took. That doesn't mean they aren't a priority, but that doesn't reflect on the government. There are still people refusing to leave.

5. New Orleans is hardly Maybury. People that are shocked by the evil that took place in the absence of authority need to wake up--its not exactly a surprise. If something crazy turned Las Vegas into chaos and anarchy, would you expect a bunch of upstanding citizens, or a rash of crime harming even the other affected citizens of Las Vegas? You're fooling yourself if you expect a city that is as dirty as New Orleans of Vegas to behave itself when the authorities cannot enforce the law.

6. The President is not the Mayor, neither is he the Governor. The State authority exists for a reason, and until certain steps have been taken, it would be entirely inappropriate for the President to impose his authority over that of the still standing Mayor and Governor. If they want help, they can ask...but he cannot just butt in, otherwise a line has been crossed and Pandora's box opened. The mayor of New Orleans needs to look in the mirror, or ask for help and relinquish power--but he needs to stop whining about the lack of Federal presence in his city.

7. Finally, what should be drastically clear in this situation is that we have created a poor society in this nation that are completely helpless when they are not receiving aid from the government. That's not to say that aid isn't needed...but in other nations with poor (the Philippines) and our own past, the poor know that they need to be able to fend for themselves. They create solutions--even when they don't permanently fix the problems, they don't wait for the rich person or the government to come along and help--for many reasons. The government moves slowly. The rich don't give things away for free. But the poor in New Orleans seem helpless. We have made them that way...so now they really don't know what to do with themselves. The great society the President references that rises from the rubble isn't what we're seeing in New Orleans...I could be wrong--perhaps once the initial grief has passed they will dig in and work to make their city great once again...but right now, we're seeing the result of a society that has been taught that the government is the only one responsible for their well-being. Its a bad thing.

So...those are my thoughts. God be with them...this is a hard time and I do pray for them.