"High horses have slippery saddles."
Tit for tat, XXX? Since your blood pressure is sky high, you felt the need to elevate mine? Well, you succeeded but you also managed to sink my opinion of you. There's nothing more miserable than poverty of the soul, and you've truly shown how miserable and poor your soul is to send out somethiing so vile, hateful, and un-Christian. This is one of the most highly offensive things I have every read. If this is the kind of person you are becoming, please understand this: I don't have room in my life for such viciousness. Understand this point very clearly, this kind of putrid belief system will not pollute my life. While I have always considered you a dear woman , this is wholly unacceptable. Hasn't your church advocated helping your fellow man instead of spitting on him? Have you ever heard the express, "Judge not, lest ye be judged?"
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"Why didn't the people in the Superdome make any effort to organize themselves? Why didn't groups of men patrol the restrooms to prevent rapes?"
They did organize themselves and now that the truth is coming out so are stories from the people that were there. The young men did band together and protected the elderly, women and children. They went out into the surrounding areas to 'loot' for food and water and they would come back and distribute these supplies among the people who were waiting for them. These were probably some of the 'looters' you saw on TV in the comfort of your home.
I can promise you that if the good citizens of New Orleans had been able to stay in their homes, and have had food drops occur within a short time, a similar scene to this Aussie idyll would have ocurred. People would have taken the less fortunate into their own homes and taken care of them. People would have had something to share.
If you got 20K Aussies held by force in a sports facility with no privacy, no electricity, no water, no food, no access to needed prescription drugs, and no information for 6 days, all knowing that they will have lost everything they owned, I suspect they would not be quite so virtuous.
Who knew that all those wonderful moral values will help you survive dehydration, heat stroke, lack of medication, heat from thousands of hot and frightened bodies, sewage that had no place to go.. It wasn't like the Survivor show where you can find the resources and use them. These people were good and trapped like a bunch of bugs in a jar.
These people were expected to save themselves?!?!? Haven't you heard about the patrolling militia, forcing everyone to stay in the convention center at gunpoint, or the racism and blocking of medical supplies getting in, food and water rations? This was the fault of poor people? I thought it was the fault of municipal governments, i.e., FEMA and Bush failing to order the National Guard to save those thousands....and bring the supplies they asked for. and then blaming it on the crime....
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/nationalspecial/10emt.html By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: September 10, 2005
Police agencies to the south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds trying to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, two paramedics who were in the crowd said.
The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people, who, instead of complying immediately with orders to leave the bridge, pleaded to be let through, the paramedics and two other witnesses said. The witnesses said they had been told by the New Orleans police to cross that same bridge because buses were waiting for them there.
Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.
"The police kept saying, 'We don't want another Superdome,' and 'This isn't New Orleans,' " said Larry Bradshaw, a San Francisco paramedic who was among those fleeing.
Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna, La., Police Department, confirmed that his officers, along with those from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection Police, sealed the bridge.
"There was no place for them to come on our side," Mr. Lawson said.
He said that he had been asked by reporters about officers threatening victims with guns or shooting over their heads, but he said that he had not yet asked his officers about that.
"As soon as things calm down, we will do an inquiry and find out what happened," he said.
The lawlessness that erupted in New Orleans soon after the hurricane terrified officials throughout Louisiana, and even a week later, law enforcement officers rarely entered the city without heavy weaponry.
While police officers saved countless lives and provided security to medical providers, many victims have complained bitterly about the behavior of some of the police officers in New Orleans in the days following Hurricane Katrina.
Officials in Lafayette, La., reported seeing scores of cruisers from the New Orleans police department in their city in the week after the hurricane. Some evacuees who fled to the Superdome and the convention center say that many police officers refused to patrol those structures after dark.
"It's unbelievable what the police officers did; they just left us," said Harold Veasey, a 66-year-old New Orleans resident who spent two horrific days at the convention center. And in the week after the hurricane, there were persistent rumors in and around New Orleans that police officers in suburban areas refused to help the storm victims.
Mr. Bradshaw and his partner, Lorrie Beth Slonsky, wrote an account about their experiences that has been widely circulated by e-mail and was first printed in The Socialist Worker.
Cathey Golden, a 51-year-old from Boston, and her 13-year-old son, Ramon Golden, yesterday confirmed the account.
The four met at the Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter. Mr. Bradshaw and Ms. Slonsky had attended a convention for emergency medicine specialists. Ms. Golden and her two children, including 23-year-old Rashida Golden, were there to visit family.
The hotel allowed its guests and nearly 250 residents from the nearby neighborhood to stay until Thursday, Sept 1. With its food exhausted, the hotel's manager finally instructed people to leave. Hotel staff handed out maps to show the way to the city's convention center, to which thousands of other evacuees had fled.
A group of nearly 200 guests gathered to make their way to the center together, the four said. But on the way, they heard that the convention center had become a dangerous, unsanitary pit from which no one was being evacuated. So they stopped in front of a New Orleans police command post near the Harrah's casino on Canal Street.
A New Orleans police commander whom none of the four could identify told the crowd that they could not stay there and later told them that buses were being brought to the Crescent City Connection, a nearby bridge to Jefferson Parish, to carry them to safety.
The crowd cheered and began to move. Suspicious, Mr. Bradshaw said that he asked the commander if he was sure that buses would be there for them. "We'd had so much misinformation by that point," Mr. Bradshaw said.
"He looked all of us in the eye and said, 'I swear to you, there are buses waiting across the bridge,' " Mr. Bradshaw said.
But on the bridge there were four police cruisers parked across some lanes. Between six and eight officers stood with shotguns in their hands, the witnesses said. As the crowd approached, the officers shot over the heads of the crowd, most of whom retreated immediately, Mr. Bradshaw, Ms. Slonsky and Ms. Golden and her son said.
Mr. Bradshaw said the officers were allowing cars to cross the bridge, some of them loaded with passengers. Only pedestrians were being stopped, he said. Chief Lawson said he believed that only emergency vehicles were allowed through.
Mr. Bradshaw said he approached the officers and begged to be allowed through, saying a commander in New Orleans had told them buses were waiting for them on the other side.
"He said that there are no buses and that there is no foot traffic allowed across the bridge," Mr. Bradshaw said.
The remaining evacuees first sought refuge under a nearby highway overpass and then trudged back to New Orleans.
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I enlisted the opinion of an expat who lives in Australia for their thoughts, and this is the response I received:
This story is unparalleled horseshit.
I live in Australia and am married to an Australian. He's lived here all his life. I spent some years living in poverty in New Orleans, and other parts of the so-called Greatest Nation On Earth, the USA.
The completely fanciful story here is telling about the Brisbane floods after Cyclone Wanda in 1974.
Refer your "friend" to this webpage, which gives a much more realistic version of the Brisbane floods situation.
http://abcasiapacific.com/englishbites/stories/s1091238... I would like you to particularly draw her attention to the following paragraph:
Australians were shocked by the enormity of the disaster. Recovery took years. Many people were angry. They thought state and local government should have done more to prevent such a disaster. Despite mitigation work, experts agree another major flood could still happen.
Everyone wasn't playing happy campers, singing around the campfire and banding together to throw another shrimp on the barby.
This woman needs to understand that there is no firewood in New Orleans for people to gather. Brisbane didn't have nearly the population of New Orleans in 1974. There wasn't the sheer magnitude of up to one million people affected. The people who supposedly wrote that idyllic little story of the happy Aussies singing Laugh Kookaburra during the floods weren't flooded themselves, I note. They might have done differently had they ended up with their home and all their possessions swamped, no power, getting herded off to the Superdome to be left there without anything for six days.
Yes, Australia depends on volunteer efforts for many things, particularly bushfire brigades. The population of Australia is small, only 20 million people. There is not the revenue or the resources to fund paid bushfire brigades. Australians turn out in force when there is a disaster, and there is a sense of lending a hand and helping your fellow Australians.
But no Australian has ever contended with the circumstances that occurred inside the Superdome. I can promise you that. And I can feel pretty sure that your modern Australian, with the exceptions of the hardy types found on cattle and sheep stations, would fare no better in a Mad Max situation than the people of New Orleans did. In fact, they would probably fare far worse, because they do not contend with the poverty and lack of opportunity that the people of New Orleans face as part and parcel of daily life.
Just because the Australian who wrote that apocryphal little fairy tale watches some reports on TV doesn't mean that they can possibly comprehend the circumstances your average poor working person in any major city of America. Australians earn good money, even those in minimum wage situations. Tell an Australian that minimum wage in America is $5.35 per hour, and they can't believe it. They have never contended with trying to live on that amount of money, and they have never dealt with the kind of poverty that your average resident of the housing projects in New Orleans copes with. They have a very good safety net of social services, despite the feeling on the part of many Australians that there should be more - and this social net includes nationalized health care, unemployment (the dole), old age pensions (and pensioners have all health care free), grants for tertiary schooling, etc. Things that poor people in America would stand up and cheer about.
Australians live in what they call the "lucky country" and I have found the city dwellers in particular, to be the softest people I've ever met. If the power goes out for an hour in Sydney, they don't know what the hell to do. Your average poor person in New Orleans would give his eyeteeth to have what the average "poor" person in Australia takes for granted.
I would also like to point out that there has been enormous news coverage of the Australian tourists who were stranded in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. They have done nothing but whine and moan and complain about their ordeals - even though most of them stayed in a hotel, had access to food and water a good part of the time, and were not subjected to the horrific conditions in the Superdome. They are a national embarrassment compared to the 98% of people in the Superdome who did the best they could under unbelievable, depraved conditions.
Living in Australia has NOTHING to do with living in America. There is no comparison. Both countries speak a form of English, and that's where it ends. And no Australia should feel, under any circumstances, that they are in any position to judge those people in New Orleans.
http://www.ncccusa.org/poverty/sermon-heishman.htmlPREACHING ABOUT POVERTY
'Hope for Those Most Often Sinned Against'
Irv Heishman
Co-Pastor of Harrisburg Church of the Brethren, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
"Not only are the poor sinners (like all people), says Raymond Fung, "they are the most often sinned against." We all know the scripture, "for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." However, there is a tendency in our culture these days to focus especially on the sins of the poor. It is easy to lay all the blame for poverty at the feet of the poor. Indeed, the poor have been blamed not only for their own poverty but also for our national indebtedness, and for violent crime to name just a few ills. So we hear the scriptures being twisted until they come out sounding something like this: "for the poor have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God," and "that’s why they’re poor. They got what they deserved. If they would just get to work, stop having babies, and stop being so lazy, they wouldn’t have to be so poor.
There is some truth to the sentiment that personal responsibility is important. Poor choices and sinful actions do contribute to poverty and a host of other social ills.
But I think Raymond Fung is onto an equally important truth that we must understand about poverty. The poor are not the only sinners. All people are sinners, according to the scripture, and the poor are the ones most often sinned against.
There's more at the link; you might need a little lesson in how to expand your spiritual generosity...
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And finally, in response to this little nugget: Citizens who, at the first sign of trouble, stand around bewildered. Funny, this describes your president's actions to a tee.
"What right does society have to say that something is right or wrong?"
- Good point. Thank God we have YOU for that.
I tried not to instill politics into my response although that's almost impossible given the magnitude of the mistakes made in the past two weeks. All I can add is that I thank GOD I'm a bleeding heart liberal and not a faux Christian as you appear to be.
Ruth
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