When the levees broke

[mediumdave]

I'm just going to quickly and quietly say that the refugees in New Orleans are human trash who don't deserve to live.This quote from an LJ user made on September 4, 2005 may be from an especially heartless individual. But I suspect that more than a few people agreed with him, especially at the highest levels of the US government, where it probably

Comments

[lawgeekgurl]

see, the GOP would say that this should be a wake-up call for citizens that their government will not, and should not, help them. see, it's all about breaking the nanny state and the feeling of entitlement by the poor!

meanwhile, the rich take care of themselves because they have the means. the poor drown.

[mediumdave]

One hopes that it'll be a different kind of wake-up call to citizens, but who knows? I think that if we internalize the idea that government won't help us, it leads not to greater self-reliance but to apathy and fatalism of the type that TNR writer Christopher Hayes described when writing about undecided voters in Wisconsin (quoted by Digsby at Hullaballo. It seems as if these folks have no realistic sense of what governments can and can't do, so they either don't vote, or they vote using criteria that make no objective sense. It's very frustrating (and I've eperienced this personally when talking to acquaintances who consider themselves apolitical).

Actually, now that I think about it, the idea that poor people feel "entitled" is one result of this. It bears no relation to reality (low-income people feel just the opposite way, usually), but it's widely believed anyway.

That sentiment

[eulipion]

I sat in a rooftop bar in Fargo, N.D. on Wednesday, Aug. 31 2005, listening to the former state director of a United States Senator come very close to that same sentiment, as he went on and on about how stupid people in New Orleans were, how no one from "up here" would behave like that, calling the people of New Orleans "animals and savages." It is a tribute to my southern upbringing, my consideration for my hosts (a candidate for city council), that this gentleman didn't end the night as a stain on the sidewalk six floors below.

Yrs from Mid-City, Eulipion

Re: That sentiment

[mediumdave]

Hello Mark, and welcome to my journal. Sorry about the late reply; it's nothing personal, I assure you. I've looked at your blog, which is fascinating... will have to read more of it when time allows.

Sadly, many mainstream news outlets were more than happy to play up the idea that NOLA had descended into bloody chaos (largely because it appealed to their own prejudices), and I believed them to some extent. What else did I have to go on? The media reported all sorts of bloodcurdling rumors as if they were facts, and I suspect this had something to do with the slow relief response. If I remember, it wasn't until a week or so after the hurricane that large numbers of evacuated residents had a chance to talk to reporters, and then a more balanced story started to come out. But there's really no excuse for the news orgs having been so careless in the first place. Hopefully that was a learning experience for the people in them...

[kimberly_t]

I haven't seen the documentary. Does it mention how some government officials tried to blame the Sierra Club for the levees not having been reinforced years ago? Even though the levee project the Sierra Club was trying to get halted did NOT involve the levees around Lake Pontchartrain, and was in fact hundreds of miles away from New Orleans?

[mediumdave]

When the Levees Broke doesn't mention that angle, but it does briefly discuss the rumors about the levees having been intentionally blown up (put in context of NOLA history, the idea didn't sound so crazy).

The Sierra Club thing doesn't surprise me much; blaming environmentalists for the lack of progress in areas such as energy development is par for the course these days, so why shouldn't it be extended into other areas? Environmentalists oppose some levees; they must be against all levees! Sure.