John Hawkins has a column that is sure to send the moonbats scurrying for their smelling salts. He says that, two years after the hurricane, it's time to get over Katrina. And he's right.
This has nothing to do with "compassion" for suffering or the poor. But, as Hawkins points out, we've already spent more money on New Orleans than we spent on the Marshall Plan, but with less success.
But, we're all supposed to eternally sit around and weep tiny little tears of sadness for the people who really took it on the chin in a hurricane because they chose to live in a city shaped like a soup bowl on the coast. Let me tell all the citizens of New Orleans something that should have been told to them 18 months ago: it's time to stop playing the sympathy card and get over it.
Nobody is owed a living for the rest of his life because he had a bad break two years ago. Yet, we still have people affected by Katrina who have FEMA paying their rent. How sad and pathetic is it that these shiftless people are still leaching off their fellow citizens? Since when is being in the path of a hurricane supposed to give you a permanent "Get Out of Work Free" card?
Is that just too honest for some people? Is it just “too mean?" Well, if your house burns down tomorrow and you're still living on the dole two years from now, are your real friends going to pat you on the back and tell you that you should keep suckling at the government teat for as long as you can or are they going to give you a kick in the behind and tell you to get a job? A real friend would be honest enough to tell you the truth and more people should do the same for Katrina victims.
Natural disasters happen all the time, from floods to hurricanes to tornadoes to fires. And I have genuine sympathy for people who have lived in the same place for 100 years and lose everything. But that can happen to any of us at any time, and I don't expect that someone in Maine should be paying for me to sit around doing nothing years after a disaster.
Liberals blamed President Bush for "slow" response to Hurricane Katrina. Yet it's two years later and the same liberals are still blaming President Bush for decades of mismanagement by the Army Corps of Engineers and incompetence by Louisiana state and local officials.
Of course, for liberals, it all comes down to "compassion." We're not "compassionate enough"if we point out the obvious: people who live in flood-prone areas or Tornado Alley or where hurricanes strike are taking personal risks in doing so. And there's only so much federal largess that should go around for that.
I know people who came here from New Orleans. Within a month of moving here, they had jobs and were rebuilding their lives. They accepted the fact that, as fun a place as New Orleans had been for them to live, they wouldn't be going back. And guess what? Two years later, they have settled in and created new lives, friends, careers. And needless to say, they aren't sitting around complaining that the government hasn't paid them enough yet.
Frankly, the people of New Orleans are lucky that they have gotten as much federal money to rebuild as they have. Galveston never got this sort of attention when it was wiped off the map in 1900. For the record, Galveston was the largest city in Texas at the time of its flood and has never been recovered that status. The damage to people and property was enormous.
At the time of the 1900 storm, the highest point in the city of Galveston was only 8.7 feet (2.7 m) above sea level. The hurricane had brought with it a storm surge of over 15 feet (4.6 m), which washed over the entire island. The surge knocked buildings off their foundations, and the surf pounded them to pieces. Over 3,600 homes were destroyed, and a wall of debris faced the ocean. The few buildings which survived, mostly solidly-built mansions and houses along the Strand District, are today maintained as tourist attractions...
As terrible as the damage to the city’s buildings was, the human cost was even greater...Eight thousand people—20% of the island’s population—had lost their lives. Most had drowned or been crushed as the waves pounded the debris that had been their homes hours earlier. Many survived the storm itself, but died after several days trapped under the wreckage of the city, with rescuers unable to reach them. The rescuers could hear the screams of the survivors as they walked on the debris trying to rescue those they could. They realized that there was no hope.
So many died that corpses were piled onto carts for burial at sea.The bodies were so numerous that burial was not a viable option. Initially, the dead were taken out to sea and dumped; however, the currents of the gulf washed the bodies back onto the beach, so a new solution was needed. Funeral pyres were set up wherever the dead were found. In the aftermath of the storm, pyres burned for weeks. Authorities had to pass out free whiskey to the work crews that were having to throw the bodies of their wives and children on the burn piles.
More people were killed in this single storm than have been killed in the over three hundred hurricanes that have struck the United States since, combined, as of 2006. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 is the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
None of this is to say people in New Orleans have not suffered. They have. But the constant drumbeat that questioning spending on New Orleans is racist and that everyone has the right to return to a disaster-prone area and have the government pay for it is both hysterical and impractical. Encouraging people to live in a place where the same disaster can hit them again is, in my opinion, cruel and stupid (I feel the same way, btw, about people getting paid to rebuild their houses on the sides of hills or where fires are prevalent).
New Orleans can rebuild and be a great city, but we don't owe anyone the right to the exact same life they had in the exact same spot as before the hurricane. Such blubbering is unrealistic and impractical. You want to help Katrina victims? Give to charities helping there, go build houses, or help relocated people blend in with new communities. But don't keep wringing your hands and screeching that we need to throw more taxpayer money at the area just to ease your conscience.
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