how the rest of the world evacuates an area: (granted this would have to have been in the 72 hr. period b/4 Katrina hit, during which it was widely know they were probably in for it.) ... [Photos of people fleeing wars and famines] ... American people need to take some things upon them selves and stop looking for someone else to always do it for them. What happened to the Americans of the depresion, the dust bowl, the soldiers after the civil war? Were they asking the government to come picke them up? No they picked themselves up of there asses and got home. Now americans are so used to sitting in front of the fuckin TV and being coddled at every turn that when bad shit happens they are helpless.
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.
A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.
American people need to take some things upon them selves and stop looking for someone else to always do it for them. What happened to the Americans of the depresion, the dust bowl, the soldiers after the civil war? Were they asking the government to come picke them up? No they picked themselves up of there asses and got home. Now americans are so used to sitting in front of the fuckin TV and being coddled at every turn that when bad shit happens they are helpless. [/b]
wait - i thought they didn't have any tv sets...?
you make a good point about others' survival skills, i'm just not sure this is the time to tackle this particular problem in the US. ultimately, NO is nothing like Kabul. there is nothing in this population's lifetimes that could prepare them for hardship of this kind...this is not the case in places you've pictured and their respective horrors. i'm not convinced that American laziness and lack of initiative is the main reason why there are people still stuck on rooftops while others sit next to dead bodies in the Dome.
I agree dude, Bush is totaly to blame for diverting funds from the area and using it for Iraq instead of strengthening those levies. I totaly agree. But look, in life someone is always gonna be out to fuck you over call it "the man" call it fate whatever. You have to take things into your own hands and control your own destiny. That is what America (and Americans) is supposed to be made out of. One shitty pres. or even a string of them should not be able to take that away from the poeple of this nation. We are far too complacent and satiated. You make of your life what you want, no one said it would be easy. You are born w/ only the gaurantee of death! Everything else you gotta do yourself. Why aren't people swiming from rooftop to rooftop towards what they know to be higher ground? Why not grap a 4 X 4 you see floating by and strike out for dry land and hopefully relief aid. Take responsability for your future people. Don't trust or rely on the government. We all know where they are gonna leave you. We see it now. We in America are faced w/ a generation that has no idea how to fend for itself, raised on foodstamps hand outs and section 8. 3 generations deep and more now. Look at what all this aid has done for American people, turned em into helpless children with no will of there own. Ok rant over.
how the rest of the world evacuates an area: (granted this would have to have been in the 72 hr. period b/4 Katrina hit, during which it was widely know they were probably in for it.) ... [Photos of people fleeing wars and famines] ... American people need to take some things upon them selves and stop looking for someone else to always do it for them. What happened to the Americans of the depresion, the dust bowl, the soldiers after the civil war? Were they asking the government to come picke them up? No they picked themselves up of there asses and got home. Now americans are so used to sitting in front of the fuckin TV and being coddled at every turn that when bad shit happens they are helpless.
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.
A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.
also, I don't really remember but wasn't the hurricane downgraded to category 3 or 4 a a day or so before it hit New Orleans? Or was that a while before.
If it was downgraded to a 3 or 4 it made sense why people waited it out, as they had been through those before.
also, I don't really remember but wasn't the hurricane downgraded to category 3 or 4 a a day or so before it hit New Orleans? Or was that a while before.
If it was downgraded to a 3 or 4 it made sense why people waited it out, as they had been through those before.
It's did go from a 5 to a 4. But like one of the wether guys said it's the difference between getting hit by a train and a desil big rig. Your getting mowed down either way. I think everyone was well informed about this, just not enough was done to get ready by the citizan's and the gov.
I've been reading that people are waiting on buses @ that stadium to get them out of N.O. Are there servicable roads that are running out of the city? Can people leave the city on foot if they want?
I've been reading that people are waiting on buses @ that stadium to get them out of N.O. Are there servicable roads that are running out of the city? Can people leave the city on foot if they want?
I think so. The problem seems to be high heat, no water and no place to go.
I would like to send my best wishes and condolences,to everyone on this message board that has been affected by this disaster.This is truly a catastrophic event.What i'm seeing on the news reports is very sad,i pray that everyone pulls through.It's actually frighting to see the devastation,i thought i experienced some bad hurricanes downhere but it cant compare to the havoc caused by Katrina.
Not everyone can buy a bus ticket and a hotel for 2 weeks you know. Black people are only about 14% of the population so how is it that they are 80% of the people left back in NO?
I think the Black population is a lot higher than 14% in New Orleans specifically, however, although I can't state this for a cold fact.
According to NBC, New Orleans is 67% Black with 30% of those people living in poverty.
Not everyone can buy a bus ticket and a hotel for 2 weeks you know. Black people are only about 14% of the population so how is it that they are 80% of the people left back in NO?
I think the Black population is a lot higher than 14% in New Orleans specifically, however, although I can't state this for a cold fact.
According to NBC, New Orleans is 67% Black with 30% of those people living in poverty.
Yea, I looked that up and was suprised to see NO is 67% black and 28% white.
how the rest of the world evacuates an area: (granted this would have to have been in the 72 hr. period b/4 Katrina hit, during which it was widely know they were probably in for it.) American people need to take some things upon them selves and stop looking for someone else to always do it for them. What happened to the Americans of the depresion, the dust bowl, the soldiers after the civil war? Were they asking the government to come picke them up? No they picked themselves up of there asses and got home. Now americans are so used to sitting in front of the fuckin TV and being coddled at every turn that when bad shit happens they are helpless.
karlito...hate to...but i gotta agree with you.
but then again...who knew it was gonna be so bad??? i was talking to my exgirlfriend, stubborn independent strong stubborn woman....i actually lived in a minivan in nola with her for a brief spell. she would have definitely tried to ride out the storm. would have been a big ooops move.
I feel bad for these folks, but they seem intent on finishing off what the storm left behind. It goes to show you what people are really made of when you wipe away the veneer of society - this is some Lord of the Flies shit. Who's got the conch?
KATRINA: THE AFTERMATH Nasty, brutish -- society's net snaps Every-man-for-himself ethos serves Americans poorly in times of crisis when people must pull together, DOUG SAUNDERS writesBy DOUG SAUNDERS
Friday, September 2, 2005 Page A12
At one point yesterday, as a helicopter-mounted camera showed a teeming swell of furious, gun-toting Louisiana residents mobbing a busload of supplies, a stunned British TV anchor spoke his mind on the air: "I'm having trouble believing that we're watching the continental United States of America. I mean, it looks like Rwanda."
A complete societal breakdown: Nobody expected that from hurricane Katrina, but that is what seems to have engulfed the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The threads that hold society together have unravelled, leaving destruction, looting, violence and desperation.
Americans, who rely on faith and fortune for so many of their most successful endeavours, are beginning to ask how those qualities have failed them so badly. Why is it that in some places struck by catastrophes of similar magnitude, entire societies pull together in enriching acts of mutual assistance, while other societies collapse into self-annihilation?
"Philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes tried to imagine what a 'state of nature' looked like -- we're now seeing it inside the United States and it's really brutal," says Alan Wolfe, a political scientist at Boston University who has written widely on the fragile foundations of U.S. society. "We're going to have to ask: 'How did we allow this to happen?' ''
In much poorer societies, such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the Boxing Day tsunami, or in more polarized societies like Montreal during the 1998 ice storm, scenes of looting, violence and selfish desperation did not occur. But the large U.S. cities of the South have a very different sort of group psychology, in which faith in individual fortune replaces the fixed social roles that keep other places aloft during crises.
In U.S. cities like New Orleans, in the analysis of the American-British organizational psychologist Cary Cooper, social cohesion depends on a shared belief that individual hard work, good luck and God's grace will bring a person out of poverty and into prosperity. But those very qualities can destroy the safety net of mutual support that might otherwise help people in an emergency.
"Fear itself motivates people in the U.S. -- the fear that you could lose everything," Prof. Cooper said in an interview yesterday from his office at the University of Lancaster. "That creates the best in American society, the inventiveness, but the moment the net is pulled out, it becomes a terrible jungle."
Observers have long recognized this tendency to societal breakdown concealed within the mass psychology of U.S. success.
"The moral mandate to achieve success exerts pressure to succeed by fair means, if possible, and by foul means, if necessary," the sociologist Robert Merton wrote in the 1960s. In times of crisis, fair means are too often replaced by foul.
There are exceptions: The extraordinary mass acts of mutual support that followed the Sept. 11 attacks in Lower Manhattan or the floods in the Dakotas, for instance, or the charitable activity that has all but ended the AIDS crisis in the United States.
But historians point to a constant threat of self-destructive breakdowns that seem to dot U.S. history, belying the thin veneer of civility that sits between entrepreneurial prosperity and mass chaos. The individualistic, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian values that have made the United States succeed have always been accompanied by an every-man-for-himself ethos that can destroy the system itself.
"America's egalitarian and meritocratic foundations tend to undercut just those institutions that sustain the values that so concern us," the American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in his book American Exceptionalism.
The U.S. historian Steven Mintz says that the Americans of the early 19th century were constantly haunted by "the spectre of social breakdown . . . rising lawlessness, poverty, prostitution, irreligion and violence, which, if not stopped, threatened to destroy the new nation's democratic experiment."
He quotes Sidney George Fisher, a well-off Philadelphian of 1844 whose reaction to the events of the day -- riots between anti-immigration Nativists and recent Irish Catholic immigrants, chiefly over education -- seem to echo the responses of many educated Americans to this week's scenes from New Orleans.
Witnessing the crazed, starved mobs bent on violence who overtook the cities in those days, he said the country seemed "destined to be destroyed by the eruption of the dark masses of ignorance and brutality which lie beneath it, like the fires of a volcano."
In seeking parallels to the current shocking breakdown of basic social functioning in Louisiana and Mississippi, a number of U.S. thinkers said they have been forced to go back to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
That disaster, which utterly destroyed one of the most pious cities of the old Roman Catholic empire at the peak of its success, revealed to people across Europe that faith in God's good grace was not enough to keep a society aloft.
The earthquake provoked the leading philosophers and politicians of the age to seek answers outside the confines of the church, and led to the creation of secular thought and the modern nation-state.
This search for a new faith, in something less magical and more likely to save our cities, was the direct motivation for the concept of the 'state of nature,' in which life is 'nasty, brutish and short,' against which the philosophers described a new, secular order -- the same one that gave rise to the American Revolution.
in more polarized societies like Montreal during the 1998 ice storm, scenes of looting, violence and selfish desperation did not occur.
I went through the Ice Storm & shit was heavy - some people in the countryside didn't have electricity for 2 months. I lived in a high school gym for near 2 weeks, sleeping on a floor or a cot when they came available - we had no power & no heating in the dead of winter. People were marooned in there homes because there was no way to really leave - imagine buildings encased in ice. There were 20 feet wide sheets of ice falling off the sides of skyscrapers on to the people below. People died. We set up neighbourhood watch patrols so because homes & shops were deserted. The army came in to help, along with firefighters from upstate new york & vermont. I'm sure that there will be some moving stories of human strength & sacrifice that will come out of Katrina's wake, but, right now, this is a shock.
And one of the things people -- nobody's talked about this. Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders. People don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it.
You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will.
And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug-starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, that are wrecking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not overrun.
Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders.
Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders.
and who's fault is that?
Well you certainly can't blame it all on the mayor.
This guy is tearing everyone a new ass, goin' off on the Feds, the Prez, the Governor of LA...I hope people have his back, because politically in today's America he just pretty much committed Hari Kari, bold as day.
Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders.
and who's fault is that?
you either need to throw up one of those $300 brazilian joints you brag about stockpiling
Comments
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.
A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.
more: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090105L.shtml
wait - i thought they didn't have any tv sets...?
you make a good point about others' survival skills, i'm just not sure this is the time to tackle this particular problem in the US. ultimately, NO is nothing like Kabul. there is nothing in this population's lifetimes that could prepare them for hardship of this kind...this is not the case in places you've pictured and their respective horrors.
i'm not convinced that American laziness and lack of initiative is the main reason why there are people still stuck on rooftops while others sit next to dead bodies in the Dome.
Someone's in deep shit...
with zero reprocussions.
If it was downgraded to a 3 or 4 it made sense why people waited it out, as they had been through those before.
It's did go from a 5 to a 4. But like one of the wether guys said it's the difference between getting hit by a train and a desil big rig. Your getting mowed down either way. I think everyone was well informed about this, just not enough was done to get ready by the citizan's and the gov.
I've been reading that people are waiting on buses @ that stadium to get them out of N.O. Are there servicable roads that are running out of the city? Can people leave the city on foot if they want?
I think so. The problem seems to be high heat, no water and no place to go.
Yea, I looked that up and was suprised to see NO is 67% black and 28% white.
karlito...hate to...but i gotta agree with you.
but then again...who knew it was gonna be so bad??? i was talking to my exgirlfriend, stubborn independent strong stubborn woman....i actually lived in a minivan in nola with her for a brief spell. she would have definitely tried to ride out the storm. would have been a big ooops move.
I feel bad for these folks, but they seem intent on finishing off what the storm left behind. It goes to show you what people are really made of when you wipe away the veneer of society - this is some Lord of the Flies shit. Who's got the conch?
KATRINA: THE AFTERMATH
Nasty, brutish -- society's net snaps
Every-man-for-himself ethos serves Americans poorly in times of crisis when people must pull together, DOUG SAUNDERS writesBy DOUG SAUNDERS
Friday, September 2, 2005 Page A12
At one point yesterday, as a helicopter-mounted camera showed a teeming swell of furious, gun-toting Louisiana residents mobbing a busload of supplies, a stunned British TV anchor spoke his mind on the air: "I'm having trouble believing that we're watching the continental United States of America. I mean, it looks like Rwanda."
A complete societal breakdown: Nobody expected that from hurricane Katrina, but that is what seems to have engulfed the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The threads that hold society together have unravelled, leaving destruction, looting, violence and desperation.
Americans, who rely on faith and fortune for so many of their most successful endeavours, are beginning to ask how those qualities have failed them so badly. Why is it that in some places struck by catastrophes of similar magnitude, entire societies pull together in enriching acts of mutual assistance, while other societies collapse into self-annihilation?
"Philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes tried to imagine what a 'state of nature' looked like -- we're now seeing it inside the United States and it's really brutal," says Alan Wolfe, a political scientist at Boston University who has written widely on the fragile foundations of U.S. society. "We're going to have to ask: 'How did we allow this to happen?' ''
In much poorer societies, such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the Boxing Day tsunami, or in more polarized societies like Montreal during the 1998 ice storm, scenes of looting, violence and selfish desperation did not occur. But the large U.S. cities of the South have a very different sort of group psychology, in which faith in individual fortune replaces the fixed social roles that keep other places aloft during crises.
In U.S. cities like New Orleans, in the analysis of the American-British organizational psychologist Cary Cooper, social cohesion depends on a shared belief that individual hard work, good luck and God's grace will bring a person out of poverty and into prosperity. But those very qualities can destroy the safety net of mutual support that might otherwise help people in an emergency.
"Fear itself motivates people in the U.S. -- the fear that you could lose everything," Prof. Cooper said in an interview yesterday from his office at the University of Lancaster. "That creates the best in American society, the inventiveness, but the moment the net is pulled out, it becomes a terrible jungle."
Observers have long recognized this tendency to societal breakdown concealed within the mass psychology of U.S. success.
"The moral mandate to achieve success exerts pressure to succeed by fair means, if possible, and by foul means, if necessary," the sociologist Robert Merton wrote in the 1960s. In times of crisis, fair means are too often replaced by foul.
There are exceptions: The extraordinary mass acts of mutual support that followed the Sept. 11 attacks in Lower Manhattan or the floods in the Dakotas, for instance, or the charitable activity that has all but ended the AIDS crisis in the United States.
But historians point to a constant threat of self-destructive breakdowns that seem to dot U.S. history, belying the thin veneer of civility that sits between entrepreneurial prosperity and mass chaos. The individualistic, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian values that have made the United States succeed have always been accompanied by an every-man-for-himself ethos that can destroy the system itself.
"America's egalitarian and meritocratic foundations tend to undercut just those institutions that sustain the values that so concern us," the American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in his book American Exceptionalism.
The U.S. historian Steven Mintz says that the Americans of the early 19th century were constantly haunted by "the spectre of social breakdown . . . rising lawlessness, poverty, prostitution, irreligion and violence, which, if not stopped, threatened to destroy the new nation's democratic experiment."
He quotes Sidney George Fisher, a well-off Philadelphian of 1844 whose reaction to the events of the day -- riots between anti-immigration Nativists and recent Irish Catholic immigrants, chiefly over education -- seem to echo the responses of many educated Americans to this week's scenes from New Orleans.
Witnessing the crazed, starved mobs bent on violence who overtook the cities in those days, he said the country seemed "destined to be destroyed by the eruption of the dark masses of ignorance and brutality which lie beneath it, like the fires of a volcano."
In seeking parallels to the current shocking breakdown of basic social functioning in Louisiana and Mississippi, a number of U.S. thinkers said they have been forced to go back to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
That disaster, which utterly destroyed one of the most pious cities of the old Roman Catholic empire at the peak of its success, revealed to people across Europe that faith in God's good grace was not enough to keep a society aloft.
The earthquake provoked the leading philosophers and politicians of the age to seek answers outside the confines of the church, and led to the creation of secular thought and the modern nation-state.
This search for a new faith, in something less magical and more likely to save our cities, was the direct motivation for the concept of the 'state of nature,' in which life is 'nasty, brutish and short,' against which the philosophers described a new, secular order -- the same one that gave rise to the American Revolution.
I went through the Ice Storm & shit was heavy - some people in the countryside didn't have electricity for 2 months. I lived in a high school gym for near 2 weeks, sleeping on a floor or a cot when they came available - we had no power & no heating in the dead of winter. People were marooned in there homes because there was no way to really leave - imagine buildings encased in ice. There were 20 feet wide sheets of ice falling off the sides of skyscrapers on to the people below. People died. We set up neighbourhood watch patrols so because homes & shops were deserted. The army came in to help, along with firefighters from upstate new york & vermont. I'm sure that there will be some moving stories of human strength & sacrifice that will come out of Katrina's wake, but, right now, this is a shock.
Holy shit.
REAL TALK
mayor was unfiltered and
HOLY FUCKING SHIT[/b]
I'm not ever 3/4th the way through this.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/nagin.transcript/index.html
and who's fault is that?
Well you certainly can't blame it all on the mayor.
This guy is tearing everyone a new ass, goin' off on the Feds, the Prez, the Governor of LA...I hope people have his back, because politically in today's America he just pretty much committed Hari Kari, bold as day.
Serious props for candor.
you either need to throw up one of those $300 brazilian joints you brag about stockpiling
or get the hell out of here
okay?
this dude is my hero.
Will our money even help if there's no one left to give it to?
Cause I sure as hell don't want all this going into government coffers instead.
And I ask you, again,
WHY IN THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE NOT BEING HELPED?[/b]
They are leaving Black people to rot and die.
This shit has gone way past the witching hour and some motherfuckers in an office need to pay.
^caught this in a design forum movie poster contest....brilliant