Debate anyone?

[dontcryemoboy12]

Ok so this entry is mainly for Marina and Kyle. We had been discussing the Hurricane situation and the ineffectiveness of our emergency response to it. Now, these talks have always been more of a discussion rather than a debate, because everyone is pretty much on the same page that the government, on both the federal and local levels, just made a

Comments

[prosewitch]

Hm, I'm uncertain how much of my sarcasm came through, and whether you were being at all sarcastic in parroting my phrase about blaming the poor.

I'm aware that there's a lot of individual agency that goes into how one lives one's life--it's not as though growing up in a lower-class environment means you can never "advance" yourself through education, hard work, and so on (though I am skeptical of the Enlightenment ideals of progress that claim to be ideology-free). At the same time, I think that there are many social infrastructures that make getting an education and getting a decent job really difficult for people who start at or near the bottom of our society.

I'm not advocating relying on welfare or relying on the government for everything--what pissed me off about the article Sami posted is that I felt like the author was blaming the poor who rely on welfare for how bad the situation in New Orleans turned, and basically using this argument as a smokescreen for the fact that both federal and state levels of government could have been doing so much more to avert the disaster before it even happened. Again, I don't believe in relying on the government for everything, but if you can't except government help in preventing and/or relieving a disaster, then when can you expect government help? I'm growing more pessimistic by the minute, sorry.