it's been awhile

Sorry I haven't been posting lately. I've been extremely busy with coaching and work and personal life and my new puppy. Spewing out half-baked rants just went to the bottom of the list. Here's what interests me at the moment.

Katrina

Yes, that veritable morass of a incompetent governance, pathetic citizens, vampiric media and altruistic outsiders. As we come upon the one year anniversary the whole thing makes me sick. To start with it has become the passion play of sorts for those who wish to bash the Bush administration. Spike Lee has directed a film in which (from all reviews I read, for I haven't seen it) the poor victimized people of New Orleans suffered and died for the sins of white American and W. No mention, of course, that more white people died or that the claims of thousands dying were figment of a collective imagination spurned on by an increasingly sensationalistic and gullible press. The press behaved so shamefully, both nationally and internationally, that their credibility lies just above pimps and just below used car salesmen.

And about New Orleans. I'm sorry, but all the paeans written to it were simply to put a dress on a slaughtered pig. People went to Crescent City to treat it like a sewer. Sure, it had a unique culture (one that I thoroughly enjoyed many times), but outside of the tourist areas, it was probably the worst city in the westernized world and the shame of our country. Drugs, murder, gangs, rampant lawlessness and swathes of burned out buildings defined the non-tourist, non-university areas. The legacy of French law, slavery and dependence upon welfare destroyed the city. When the waters came, the people were too dull-eyed and dependent to take matters into their own hands.

The true lesson of New Orleans is don't look to somebody above to save you if you can save yourself. That thousands of able bodied people would willfully remain in the city despite the fact that they had been warned about the danger either shows a blatant disregard for their own safety or a rank dependence that one expects of toddlers. The people of Mississippi and Alabama got hit just as hard and with just as diverse a population, but ended up maintaining public order and, more importantly, their dignity and will to move on.

In the end the city will rebuild. It's too important to not do so. I fear, however, with the largesse shown by the fed that we will just have been feeding the same dangerous and pathetic monster that reared its head one year ago.