Welcome to the Third World
I don't have TV these days, so I've yet to see any video footage of New Orleans. I just know what I read in the papers. But it seems hard to avoid the impression that a sizeable chunk of the U.S. descended into third-world and/or state-of-nature conditions with astounding rapidity.
I suppose we won't know the real story about all this for some time, but the accounts so far make me reflect on Statisticasaurus Rex's point that it is our civic duty to be prepared for disasters. If your house is destroyed, then such preparation might be for nought, of course, but there are lots of bad things that can happen short of that. Some people may be too poor to have extra food on hand, but that's not the position most of us are in.
It would be interesting to know how many people now stranded and miserable are in that condition because they were too poor or old or sick to leave, and how many are are in that condition because they chose to stay. Conservatives, of course, are more inclined to blame too much, though liberals are inclined to blame too little. That is, conservatives often assert that people are responsible for things that they are, in fact, not responsible for, whereas liberals often excuse things that should not be excused. No doubt the miserables in New Orleans are a mix of the unlucky and the stupid, but I, for one, have no idea what the proportions are like.
Incidentally, had I been there I'd probably be one of the stupid. I've always wanted to ride out a hurricane, and I might just have laid in a supply of beer and waited. Shows how much I know.
I don't have TV these days, so I've yet to see any video footage of New Orleans. I just know what I read in the papers. But it seems hard to avoid the impression that a sizeable chunk of the U.S. descended into third-world and/or state-of-nature conditions with astounding rapidity.
I suppose we won't know the real story about all this for some time, but the accounts so far make me reflect on Statisticasaurus Rex's point that it is our civic duty to be prepared for disasters. If your house is destroyed, then such preparation might be for nought, of course, but there are lots of bad things that can happen short of that. Some people may be too poor to have extra food on hand, but that's not the position most of us are in.
It would be interesting to know how many people now stranded and miserable are in that condition because they were too poor or old or sick to leave, and how many are are in that condition because they chose to stay. Conservatives, of course, are more inclined to blame too much, though liberals are inclined to blame too little. That is, conservatives often assert that people are responsible for things that they are, in fact, not responsible for, whereas liberals often excuse things that should not be excused. No doubt the miserables in New Orleans are a mix of the unlucky and the stupid, but I, for one, have no idea what the proportions are like.
Incidentally, had I been there I'd probably be one of the stupid. I've always wanted to ride out a hurricane, and I might just have laid in a supply of beer and waited. Shows how much I know.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:57 AM
2 Comments:
I've seen estimates that say that as many as 100,000 New Orleanians do not own cars, which, considering the fact that Louisiana is the poorest state in the union, seems utterly plausible. Factor in the cost of gas, and I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that the majority of people stuck in the city were without the means to leave. Consider the disturbingly Randian nature of the pre-hurricane evac: the authorities essentially told the citizens if you've got a car, get out of town, if you don't, as Jonah Goldberg might eloquently put it, grow gills. Grayhound suspended travel to and from the city on Saturday, two days before the hurricane hit land.
The average income of whites in NO is a bit over $30k/yr. The average income of blacks in NO is $11k/yr.
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