NEW AMERICAN TRUTH: December 2007

UN-Common Sense:
Examining Common Absurdity Everywhere
By: Chuck Bennett

Last month’s Un-Common Sense resulted in quite a few emails. A few of which were totally unintelligible. While I understand there were vast differences in the scope of the two events listed (Katrina’s effect on New Orleans and the fires in Southern California), I was looking for some observations in reference to the response from the people involved. While I would have prefered to reprint every response to the article, I simply don’t have the space. So, here are a couple that I really think polarized your thoughts.

(The opinions expressed in these letters in no way are endorced by myself or New American Truth and are the opinions of the authors alone. While I may agree with some of the thoughts stated, I would rather not point fingers.....prices subject to change without notice... Your mileage may very.)

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Dear Mr. Bennett:

You asked “What happened differently during these fires and Hurricane Katrina?” My first response is to chide you for attempting to compare the calamity of Hurricane Katrina and the wildfires in California. The two events could not be any more different.

In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina caused an immediate and total collapse of a major city. Every aspect of modern life was removed from the population in a matter of hours: There was no power. No running water. No food. No police protection. The health care system was overwhelmed. Shelter was unavailable as a majority of homes were left uninhabitable. And transportation/evacuation was impossible. 80% of the densely populated city - nearly 144 square miles - was covered in a toxic mixture of flood water, raw sewage and debris. 217 square miles of coastline were wiped off the map overnight. Not a single resident of New Orleans, or the entire gulf coast for that matter, was untouched by Hurricane Katrina. And the storm was only the beginning of the nightmare. It will take many decades, or longer, for New Orleans to recover.

The wildfires of California are not even in the same league. Power is still on. Water is still running. The food supply chain is functioning normally. The local police are in charge. The health care system is functioning normally. Transportation/evacuation routes are open. And, in San Diego for instance, only a small minority of people have been directly affected by the fires, thankfully leaving a fresh and plentiful supply of volunteers. And when the fires are extinguished, life in San Diego will quickly return to normal.

It’s not hard to figure out what happened differently during the fires and Hurricane Katrina. It’s simply a matter of the scope and severity of the events. Sincerely, S. A. S. St. Louis, MO

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In response to your request for comments (if any) about the differences between the San Diego area fires and the fiasco that was the response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, especially concerning attitudes, responses and community I have the following opinions:

First and foremost, both New Orleans and the State of Louisiana suffer from poor leadership in their CEO’s, namely Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco including their staffs. While both Governors Bob Riley of Alabama and Haley Barbour of Mississippi had both mobilized the elements of the National Guard and requested that FEMA be put on stand-by, Governor Blanco refused to request federal aid until several days (I believe five if my memory serves me correctly).

Blanco flatly refused President Bush’s offer of earlier assistance on the night that Katrina made landfall. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security have both been ridiculed by the main stream media while they’ve turned a blind eye at Nagin’s and Blanco’s incompetence.

I didn’t hear (and still don’t) any complaints about the response of the federal government in general, or FEMA in particular from the people of Alabama or Mississippi post Katrina. The Mississippi Gulf coast had much more damage than did New Orleans, yet recovery efforts went fairly smoothly there. Even though the City of New Orleans Emergency Plan called for citizens without transportation to be evacuated on school buses, Nagin sent the bus drivers home on Friday afternoon instead of keeping them on stand by and having those civilians who couldn’t leave to be evacuated starting on Saturday morning. Those same school buses were almost underwater still parked after the storm hit. The Police Chief failed to make any preparations for the city to be flooded either resulting in most of the NOPD’s patrol cars being flooded and unusable.

To make matters worse, when assistance did begin to arrive, some of the city’s disgruntled population fired upon them instead of being glad to see them. I haven’t heard of that type of thing going on in San Diego. To the contrary, the people out there are grateful for assistance and show it with their signs expressing thanks to the fire fighters. The citizens in San Diego don’t suffer from a “Victim” mentality, but instead realize that bad things happen and are grateful to be alive. They evidently realize that things can be replaced, while lives cannot.

The sad fact that Nagin was re-elected as mayor of New Orleans simply proves that the majority of the people remaining in that city don’t care that Nagin failed to even remain in the city, but instead fled to Texas leaving his incompetent staff behind to “handle” things while he checked in by phone for something like 3 days. He should’ve been impeached for gross incompetence and negligence, if allowed by Louisiana law. I find it beyond my comprehension that he was re-elected.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also caught a lot of grief over the poor shape of the levees, little was said about the gross mismanagement, if not outright fraud by city officials who used federal tax-payer funds earmarked for maintaining the levees on their own “pet” projects.

The last difference that I see is that the majority of the residents in San Diego, unlike the majority of the residents of New Orleans don’t try to “blame” President Bush for a choice that they themselves made. The Ninth Ward of New Orleans consists of mainly government assisted housing and is BELOW sea level. There have been hurricanes hit the area before and will likely hit it again, just as there have been wildfires in Southern California almost yearly and probably will continue to be. The people who built homes there knew the risks before hand and accept it, the residents of the Ninth Ward don’t. To my knowledge, no body FORCED them to live there and nobody FORCED them to not have the personal responsibility to work and provide for themselves and their families. I can’t imagine an adult of sound mind and somewhat sound body not being employed by choice in this “land of opportunity.” I can’t imagine a “head-of-the-household” in the U.S. NOT having a car, or having a close friend or neighbor who did and had arranged evacuation when advised to do so.

This is my opinion and in no way represents the views of my co-workers or employer.
David

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Greetings and Happy Holidays.
I am a former soldier, DAV, and proud American. I will start my correspondence to you with a hearty thank you for the magazine NEW AMERICAN TRUTH. I do like the ad for ad space for right minded people. I had a survival and small unit tactics instructor that talked about the proper mental attitude. Not a positive mental attitude but a proper mental attitude. We are the right kind of people, we protect the weak, defend the helpless, fight for honor, maintain integrity and keep our word. Right minded people!

Onto the difference in disaster attitude. I can sum it up and remain politically correct at the same time. Cultural attitude. A mental attitude adopted to your immediate surroundings. It was not about race, or religion, but cultural attitude. I have personal friends in the San Diego area and were worried about them because I know one of my friends was helping his neighbors put sprinklers on the roofs of his and neighbors houses. He evacuated his wife and kids and then went back to help others. He is personally responsible for saving several houses because his idea to wet the roofs prevented the flying embers from catching hold. He had a helping and altruistic attitude and was not concerned with material gain at the time of the catastrophe. He stayed with is his neighbors house until firemen ordered him to leave as the winds were whipping in their direction. Even then he moved to a nearby hillside and kept watch over his neighborhood. He was not alone. I don’t recall hearing any stories of looting, or people committing crimes during this disaster.

I worked for a major insurance company handling claims during Katrina, and I can tell you first hand that the cultural attitude was “give me, give me, give me”, Or, more accurately, “gimme, gimme, gimme.” I took hundreds of calls but only one stands out. A former Ranger, Vietnam Vet and grandfather was caught in the flood because his mayor told him it was ok to stay. He and his family were trapped in the attic of a two story house, the water closing in on the second floor. This former Ranger jumped into the fetid water, ignoring the dangerous currents and swam to his garage, obtained an ax, swam back, and cut his roof open to pull his wife and grand daughter to safety. They were eventually picked up by a BlackHawk but were not allowed to bring any personal items or even the baby’s diaper bag. The child’s parents were both in the Navy at the time and deployed. Now the reason this hero, this elderly grandfather, was prohibited from bringing anything on board other than his family was that the other people already on board had brought along so much stuff that the chopper was at its limit for weight.

This is a true story. Not one of those people were willing to unload a suitcase, or box of photos, or whatever they had that they felt was more important than their lives, to allow this grandfather to bring along diapers and food for the baby. They were dropped off near the I-10 service road and by the time they found a place to rest, there was no more water, no more blankets and this man, this amazing man, laid down on the filthy ground and had his wife hold the grandchild and sit on him.

They were not offered anything by anyone. There were many there that had cases of water, and stacks of blankets, and they were fiercely guarding them. This hero eventually had to be treated with antibiotics for the infections in his wounds from lying in the squalor. Now as this man related this story to me, it choked me up, first with pride, (AIRBORNE!) and then with anger and then shame. I broke protocol and told this man how I felt and his response was simple and direct: he didn’t want anything other than what his insurance would allow him for his vehicle. (We paid for that car sight unseen within 48 hours). I even told him that his story deserved to be in TIME magazine, and he just said he did what he had to do. He was amazingly humble about his experience and just anxious to get back to his house and start working on it. He wasn’t complaining about the government or how he was entitled to money, just was handling his business. His story will not ever make the papers or be known but to the few people I relate it to; confidentiality clauses and all that insurance license stuff.

Now here is the difference, New Orleans, LA had a selfish, material, welfare mentality perpetuated by the ultra liberal local and state politicians - those politicians that tried to make it about race. Oh that retired Army Ranger? He was African American. The people on the chopper were African American. The majority of the people at the staging area that took all of the water, cots and blankets, were African American. I am not saying it was about race, but clarifying that it was most definitely NOT about race as they were the same race, from the same area and same culture. That culture was New Orleans - riddled with crime, drugs and anything but Christian morals.

FEMA announced it would assist the Katrina victims with $1500.00 EBT cards to buy necessities. We will never know how many were used to buy video game consoles, liquor, advanced for cash to buy drugs, or received by non Katrina victims. That is embarrassing to FEMA, but we all know that it was done, because it was well documented by the mainstream media.

In San Diego county, companies were giving out water, and blankets and food and drinks, and people would take just enough for themselves and move on. In Louisiana, when water was distributed people grabbed as much as they could, took it from others, and horded it. Individuals looted, robbed, and committed heinous crimes all on camera. Apparently they didn’t realize that the news helicopter could get clear video of them from the air, or if they did, they smiled and waved, if they weren’t afraid to drop the boxes of tennis shoes or that big screen television they had just stolen. It was a glaring example of cultural differences: the culture that values things or values. To this very day I still hear people whining “I’m a Katrina Victim”. I think, “No, you are just a really bad decision maker who is waiting for the next handout and welfare check to show up.”

So before I turn this into one of my rants, I will reiterate that the largest difference is cultural. Many will complain of the financial differences, that the California victims were more financially secure to start and had insurance etc. Well, alright then, let’s admit that people in San Diego, are for the most part, more educated, more responsible and more civic minded. The culture in New Orleans is one of crime, hatred, and want. They want but are not willing to wait. They suffer from a need for immediate gratification and that difference in cultures is what made the California disaster flow whereas the Katrina disaster was just that, a disaster.

We all start out equal, and through education, and experience we become who we are. If you want an education, you can get one. If you want to work, a job will be there. If all you want to do is sit around and wait for the welfare check, then that is what you will be. It is never about race, it is all about culture.

This of course being solely my opinion and no way reflects upon anyone but me.
Sincerely,
Russ

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Once again I would like to thank everyone who took the time to write. I’m sorry I couldn’t use every submission...you are an oppinionated bunch.

Write me with your thoughts (if any) to: uncommonsense@newamericantruth.com
If you have comments to this article, or any article in this publication, drop us an email at readercomments@newamericantruth.com