HURRICANE KATRINA: CAUSE AND EFFECT

Before a hurricane hits, m ake sure and stock up on the essentials... like bright red fruit-flavored sugar water.

This article is titled “Hurricane Katrina: Cause and Effect”. The first thing that I do want to do is send condolences to the folks that lost loved ones and Earthly belongings, no one in the area escaped the wrath of this awesome storm and for that I am truly sorry. Ok, enough of that crap!! I, of course, question the rationality of anyone who lives in the South anyway and this storm only goes to show that living anywhere in the South is hazardous to your health and seemingly your brain.

The purpose of this article is to explore why the disaster had the effect that it did. So why did this storm cause so much damage and why did it kill so many people? The first answer to that question is the incredible strength of the hurricane itself, Katrina was a Category 4/5 hurricane, the likes of which only hit our nation every decade or so. Very little could be done to alleviate the physical destruction that this hurricane caused. I was watching the Weather Channel all day on the Sunday before the storm made landfall and I was awestruck at the size and the strength of the storm. As a more than casual observer of meteorology, I knew that this storm was of rare magnitude and that New Orleans and Biloxi were in for a wild ride.

This brings me to my first point. I read two years ago that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans would cause a historic calamity. New Orleans sits below sea level and the size of the storm surge associated with such a huge hurricane would, in all likelihood, flood the entire city of New Orleans. Now, if I knew this, why the hell didn’t the leadership of the city of New Orleans? Because they were utterly incompetent is why!! The lion’s share of the blame for the aftermath should be shouldered by the leaders of the city. There should have been a mandatory evacuation of the city, no questions asked. While this mistake was made by the leaders of the city, it does not excuse the idiocy of the people who stayed in the city. They were told to leave and they did not… and I do not want to hear that they could not leave, they had ample time, and they just chose to ignore the warnings. They did this for a few reasons. The first reason is that most of the people who stayed are generally ignorant people, they do not watch the news, listen to the radio, they were too busy enjoying their lives as scum sucking welfare addicts. My main assertion is that if these losers were told that they could get a $500 book of food stamps if they went fives miles north, they would have in a heartbeat.

"Hey, all hell has broken lose, there is no water or power, our homes have been destroyed, and there are dead bodies floating down the street... let's steal some sneakers!"

The main cause of this laziness is modern American welfare state. Welfare has a way of destroying the very people it seeks to assist. It does this by robbing the people of work ethic and leads to a dependence on the government rather than the community. This transfer of responsibility diminishes the importance of family and community and in the process, made the government the “father” of children in these communities. This is one of many reasons why most poor children are born out of wedlock; these people are not having more sex than rich, suburban kids they just don’t care enough about themselves to take the appropriate precautions. Why? Because there are not any ramifications of this type of behavior. When you have a faceless father who just writes a check every month, there is no pressure to do the right thing and these things include working, not spitting out seven kids with seven fathers, showering, brushing your teeth, etc. These bums are helpless and they are that way because our government has been taking care of their whims for decades and unless someone came to pick them up in an air conditioned car, they were not leaving. In other words, the laziness of welfare scrubs is only partially their fault; the blame must also be shared by us, the people who have been supporting these clowns since Reconstruction. While they sit around drinking malt liquor and burning blunts, we write the check and we should be ashamed of ourselves of letting this happen out of some sort of guilt about the past. To only exacerbate the problem our government is handing these people debit cards with $2000 on them, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I am paying for this type of bailout? I cannot even stomach the thought. I am sure that they people will be buying essentials, beer, tobacco, music, shoes, and the like! It is despicable.

I have seen that many in the media have tried to make this a racial issue. I have heard “If these people were white, Bush would have done something sooner”. Nothing could be further from the truth; I would bet even money that the aid would have been substantially reduced had this happened in the upper Midwest. Why?? Because the people would have taken care of themselves, they are self-sufficient because they have to be and this is not true of the dregs of New Orleans. No National Guard or Army troops would have been necessary because the rampant lawlessness that followed Hurricane Katrina would not have happened in, say, Iowa.

Real-life super hero Shaquille O ' Neal, saves the day once again. God bless him!

I am going to examine the race issue further by using historical reference and the current administration’s record on the subject. Recently, we have been hearing a lot about Africa and the need for aid on that poverty stricken continent. We have seen the pictures, young Africans kids starving because their parents have died from AIDS and we feel terrible about it, and rightfully we should. What we have never seen is the poverty and anarchy that dominates the former Soviet Union in places such as the Ukraine, Belarus and Greater Russia. Why is that?? When we hear about these people starving and dying, most of us look at them and say “To hell with them, they can figure it out” while at the same time writing checks to aid Africans. This is mostly because of the inherent belief that Africans cannot help themselves while Eastern Europeans can. This guilt-induced reverse racism is disgusting to me. I hear the same thing when it comes to immigration. I live in an area of heavy Eastern European immigration and I hear the complaints from native-born Americans “What the hell are all these Russians doing here, they are just stealing, and setting up organized crimes syndicates everywhere”, and we also complain about Hispanic immigrants incessantly as evidenced by those bastard minutemen who claim to defending our borders. The xenophobia aimed at these people is acceptable to many, but if these same people were complaining about Arab or African immigrants, they would be labeled as bigots and racists. My reasoning for bringing all of this to your attention is to point out the reverse racism that is everywhere in our nation. We all want immigrants to be self-sufficient and they should be, but at the same time we allow and bankroll poor, uneducated, native-born Americans to live a life of borderline helplessness because we feel sorry for them. This has to stop!! If we are equal, then lets be equal, no more handouts, no more special consideration for so-called “minorities” (in many areas of the South, European Americans are the true minority but you can bet everything that affirmative action does not apply to them). The only way to fix this is to have a truly level playing field for all; men, women, white, blacks, Arabs, Hispanics, gays, straights, intelligent, stupid, educated and ignorant. This is my American Dream!!

-arthur@arthurshall.com