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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dave, Maybe they call them refugees because they
are seeking refuge. I think people are too sensitive about labels or
titles. What's the big deal? I know who I am. By the way, call
me Nana, I don't care so much for Grandma. :)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Carla</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=gcfl-discuss@gcfl.net href="mailto:gcfl-discuss@gcfl.net">Discussion
of the Good, Clean Funnies List</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=cstolo@bellsouth.net
href="mailto:cstolo@bellsouth.net">cstolo@bellsouth.net</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, September 10, 2005 8:44
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: [GCFL-discuss] A different
perspective on Katrina</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Why does everybody insist on calling the
displaced people in the South ( refugees), their AMERICANS driven from
their homes by a storm...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dave</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=gcfl-discuss@gcfl.net
href="mailto:gcfl-discuss@gcfl.net">Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies
List</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=sdmheit@verizon.net
href="mailto:sdmheit@verizon.net">Shirley Heit</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Friday, September 09, 2005 7:50
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [GCFL-discuss] A different
perspective on Katrina</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080 size=2>
<DIV>This makes you wonder. Now I'm not denying there are many people
who need help. I just wonder. Frank</DIV></FONT></STRONG></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080
size=2></FONT></STRONG> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080
size=2></FONT></STRONG> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080
size=2></FONT></STRONG> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080 size=2>POINT OF VIEW<BR
class=Apple-interchange-newline></DIV></FONT></STRONG><FONT id=role_document
face="Arial Baltic" color=#0000ff size=3>
<DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000cc><STRONG>This may be a point of view on Hurricane
Katrina that is hard to swallow but there are some valid an interesting
points worth considering.</STRONG></FONT></DIV><STRONG><FONT
color=#0000cc></FONT>
<DIV><BR>by Robert Tracinski <BR>Sep 02, 2005 <BR><BR>It took four
long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the
disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four
long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that
the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a
natural disaster. <BR><BR>If this is just a natural disaster, the response
for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you
send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send
engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's<BR>infrastructure. For
journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of
ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of
doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and
rebuild. <BR><BR>Public officials did not expect that the first thing they
would have to do i s to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle,
as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists, myself
included -did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and
flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting. <BR><BR>But this is not a
natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster. <BR><BR>The man made disaster
is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and
it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about
every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
<BR><BR>The man made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not
happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades.
Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view. <BR><BR>The man made
disaster is the welfare state. <BR><BR>For the past few days, I have found
the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you
would expect them to behave in an emergency, indeed, t hey were not behaving
as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many
people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America.
In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
<BR><BR>When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the
occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they
spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially
true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own
initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us.
I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main
traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their
cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the
intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to
September 11). <BR><BR>So what explains the chaos in New Orleans? <BR><BR>To
give you an idea of the m agnitude of what is going on, here is a
description from a Washington Times story: <BR><BR>"Storm victims are raped
and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are
breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue
helicopters are repeatedly fired on. <BR><BR>"The plea from Mayor C. Ray
Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop
the looting, carjackings and gunfire.... <BR><BR>"Last night, Gov. Kathleen
Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq hardened Arkansas National Guard members were
inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders. <BR><BR>" 'These troops
are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have
M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and
kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they
will.' " <BR><BR>The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies
this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an
armored vehicle through trash strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid,
listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly
like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad. <BR><BR>What explains bands of thugs
using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery,
and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived
to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their
lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at
the Superdome? <BR><BR>Why are people responding to natural destruction by
causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are
trying to help them? <BR><BR>My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she
figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one
night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar
feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago,
which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the
Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in
America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for
uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully,
been demolished.) <BR><BR>What Sherri was getting from last night's
television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then
the "crawl", the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen
on most news channels-gave some vital statistics to confirm this<BR>sense:
75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the
hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's
public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from
CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the
prisoners in the city's jails-so they just let many of them
loose.<BR>[Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story
, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous
reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police
Department; see here and here.] <BR><BR>There is no doubt a significant
overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in
the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
<BR><BR>There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when
the deluge hit-but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from
two groups: criminals-and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over
decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The
welfare wards were a mass of sheep-on whom the incompetent administration of
New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves. <BR><BR>All of this is related,
incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to
plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this
might be necessary. In a city corrupte d by the welfare state, the job of
city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and
patronage to political supporters-not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation
in case of emergency. <BR><BR>No one has really reported this story, as far
as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming
President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor
of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is
an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious
Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is
precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact
opposite of individualism. <BR><BR>What Hurricane Katrina exposed was
the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider
"normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who
have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect th em. People
with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever
it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and
complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use
the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
<BR><BR>But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry
about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't
own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their
businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about
those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off
of stolen wealth is a way of life for them. <BR><BR>People living in piles
of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't
doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to
rescue them-this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It
is a perfect sum mary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its
public housing projects. <BR><BR>The welfare state and the brutish,
uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages is the man made disaster
that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is
the story that no one is reporting. </DIV>
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<DIV> </DIV></STRONG></DIV></FONT>
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