NOLA Blogs – What you reap is what you sow

From Humid City:

After a week of sitting on my ass waiting for the so-called "cavalry" (Is that some sick joke? Why do the media keep using that word to describe the rescue effort? Cavalries are large, powerful and fast-moving. Haven't seen anything matching that description since Monday morning when a storm passed through.) to save my hometown, here are some of the thoughts I've collected:

Having lived in New Orleans for thirty-one years, I'm now seeing New Orleans' poor from the perspective of the rest of the country. Have you been shocked to see on television so many people, poor, angry and violent, and crammed together with no options? Guess what, viewers: that describes the situation in New Orleans from before the hurricane to as far back as anyone can remember. We've been complacent about this situation so long we don't even notice it anymore. It was a societal volcano ready to erupt.

I'm getting a new understanding of poverty: not just a low bank balance but a desert of options. We're seeing descendants of a slave population abruptly cut loose with no forty acres and sure as hell no mule; and we see from interviews on national television that in the twenty-first century they are just as hungry, uneducated, disenfranchised, desperate and threatened with worse as they were in 1866. Those are my next-door neighbors you're looking at, and as such I DO give a rat's ass about them.

DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT ENTITLEMENT. Adam Smith himself knew the societal value of free and compulsory education -- in fact he endorsed it, and for this reason: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PACK TOGETHER ALREADY-FUCKED PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN CHASED DOWN TO THEIR LAST RESORT. (If you international readers think they have the option of going to school, you are painfully naive about the state of New Orleans public schools. Sending a child to one of our schools is like sending an adult to prison: they just come out worse.) Shouldn't we expect anyone pushed beyond their limit, dehydrating, starving and overheating, dying from lack of medical care, hamstrung to care for their families, jerked around by the authorities, to take it badly? Expect an entire population treated like animals, fed, clothed and housed like animals, and now cornered like animals to react as animals would. No shit it's outrageous! It happens also to be predictable and avoidable. You know the mayor's got his own world taken care of, and he still lost his shit on live radio. What do you think the common people are gonna do?

No more smoking in the powder magazine, folks ... if the magazine gets rebuilt. Okay?