To our members in the South

You are right dreed, there will be plenty of time to do the “why not” thing later. Thanks for the reality check.

>Driveshaft anyone?

I haven’t been able to find anything about their setup.

I haven’t looked. There probably is a good reason, but it doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do to me. Course I think the levees were a joke anyway.

I hope things start to improve soon.

Andrei Codrescu did a wonderful piece yesterday on NPR about how New Orleans has been forsaken and will never recover from the all too predictable assault of Katrina. I’ve been trying to find it to post a link here. No luck so far. Anyone else hear it?

I understand it takes a long time to mobilize troops. They don’t need a ton of troops, they simple need a way out. The federal government needed to help New Orleans with transportation logistics. They are flying troops in—can’t they fly refugees out? That’s all I’m saying. People wouldn’t be going nuts trapped inside the city if they weren’t trapped inside the city.

Hey zane,

A heads up. When I say enough…..

I didn’t see a post from you saying to stop. But I will now. It’s just I’ve been watching the news all day and I’m so mad. Babies are dying in New Orleans from lack of formula. It’s making me angry.

Sorry, I removed my warning and a lot of other posts. Us bitching and arguing about it here and getting each other pissed off isn’t going to do any good right now. I promise we can go at each other at a later date. I have a bag full of bitches myself.

Wrenching my mind back to cocks….

I suppose all I can do is throw money at it and curse at my television set.

What bothers me is that they are already talking about rebuilding New Orleans on the news. It seems to me that people should be taken out of the city and then maybe, later on, they could think about rebuilding. And maybe moving the city to a place that isn’t below sea level…

My heart gos out to all of those who are injured, dead, or worse…

I believe that they talk about rebuilding the city to give hope to those from there and stuck there. If they didn’t it would just be Day of the Dead without the Zombies. If something happened to my area, it would fuck with me since I lived here my whole life and it is part of my identity, which is true for may others.

My thoughts go out for the people of that region. What a rough hand dealt in the game of life for them.

Oh hell, one more post. I worked for ten years at an environmental consulting agency. They aren’t going to rebuild there—the place is going to be a hazardous waste site the likes of which this country has never seen. They simply can’t rebuild New Orleans, there isn’t enough money in the country to do the remediation.

Special dispensation from the pope dear.

I’ve been thinking this morning about how ugly this has turned. My theory is that the pre-storm evacuation of the city was like a big filtering process.

Keep in mind that even before the storm, New Orleans was one of the most violent cities in the USA (there was a recent story that the murder rate was 10 times the national average, making it the highest in the country). I can tell you that there is a large segment of poor, undereducated people in New Orleans, lots of drugs, etc. Good jobs are hard to come by. Like in a lot of cities, most of the people who work downtown in the good paying jobs live in the suburbs. Because New Orleans itself is surrounded by water, some of these suburbs are across those bodies of water, whether across Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi River, or the swamps to the west of the city. For the actual New Orleans citizens, the only jobs available are in service jobs or the tourism industry, all low paying stuff. It is (was?) the best place in the USA to go to party, but raising a family in the actual city was a risky proposition for most people. Most of the poor in New Orleans are black, and rightly or wrongly they perceive themselves to be the victims of a long history of systemic discrimination. That is obviously a gross generalization, but let’s just say that racial tensions are high.

Now back to the filter theory. It’s not like an earthquake or tornado. Wealthy and middle-class people who have cars and so forth had time to pack up and leave. The idea of a few hundred $$ for a hotel for a few nights was no big deal to them. This left a high concentration of the poor and/or criminal elements. Again, these people already feel disenfranchised. After the storm, with rescue efforts moving so slowly, it is easy for me to understand how this has escalated into what we are seeing in the news. You have a much higher proportion that normal of criminals, the police are basically gone.

I am certainly not saying that everyone who was left in New Orleans was a criminal. What I mean is that in normal conditions, maybe 0.1% of the population might be violent, and is held in check by the police and peer pressure. Now, due to this filtering process, maybe 10% of the population are violent criminals.

Arrgh, I am having a hard time putting this into words. I can visualize in my head pretty clearly what is going on in the Superdome right now, and with just a touch of hindsight I have to say I am not surprized.

As for all the people fussing about the government response, I think they are being unrealistic. This is a HUGE disaster. A medium sized city which was the hub of the economy for the region has basically been wiped off the map. The authorities are saying it will be months before some basic services are restored, I think they are underestimating. Probably thousands of people are dead, and tens of thousands need to be evacuated.

I have to wonder how many people will just take their insurance check and move elsewhere.

Thanks for all the updates and thoughts, everyone. Hopefully we can learn a lot from this terrible disaster to prepare us for future disasters.