Steam-letting

My sister and I always laughed about the very very frightening fact that *we* got the most normal, mentally well of the Brink Sisters. (of course, they both had amazing wonderful husbands who I adore. Probably more than I adore my aunts! Well. More than I adore Aunt P now, that’s for damn sure.

Now, Aunt S….she’s nutso in that endearing kind of way. In that kind of chuckle while you roll your eyes but don’t really say anything out loud, cuz she’s harmless way.

Aunt P? She’s just a frigging fruitcake. And perhaps the difference between the two is that Aunt S? She listens and hears. She may not agree, but…she doesn’t pretend that she’s better off than you, she doesn’t put on aires, ya know? She recognizes…acknowledges…embraces the fact that she is a small town person. Raised in a small town. Never really left- never really had a desire to p’raps. But Aunt P…pretends that because her children are smart and have travelled the world…that she has as well. I bet…i BET ten to one, if someone were to say “But, you were raised in the same place as your sisters, why do you disdain it so much..?” I bet you that her response would be akin to “Oh. I was raised there. But I was never LIKE them. *I* was different. ” And she may not SAY that she was “BETTER” than them, but she might as well have an LCD screen on her forehead saying as much, cuz that’s totally how she comes across.

Anyways. Yeah. So. I got an email from Aunt P before work. I shall post the article, as well as my resonse. It’s prolly self-explanatory….

Incidentally, I was listening to a nurse (McDidiot..) talking to one of my most beloved semi-co-workers last nite before the coworker left for home…McDidiot was talking about taking her daughter down to Louisiana for skewl. And. “How the black people down there are so nice. Just so polite and friendly. They’re just like us! Not like the ones we have up here…” Those may not have been her actual words, but quite close. And the conversation continued, but I thought it best for me to just turn on heel and walk out of the room before I resorted to Being Honest and telling her how I felt about her comments. And. I know. If no one speaks up, nothing gets done. True. But. She’s dumber than a rock and I just don’t think she’d get it even if I tried to explain it that the use of “us” and “them” was essentially inappropriate in such a context, that she was making a gross generalization and lumping people into groups with labels they shouldn’t have.

She needs to get together with my Aunt P. *rolls eyes*

Anyways. If you’re already enraged about the way, ya know, “those people. All those poor black people..” are being portrayed, you might not want to read this article. OR my response. Which I sent this morning.

Subject: Real Story

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
the
Welfare State

An Objectivist Review
by Robert Tracinski | The Intellectual Activist
September 2, 2005

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to
figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can’t blame
them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what
is
going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if
you
think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public
officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send
transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send
engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city’s infrastructure.
For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the
heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work
and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being
taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would
have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as
if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists–myself
included–did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind,
and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent
response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by
Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and
television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did
not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four
decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to
be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to
behave in an emergency–indeed, they were not behaving as they have
behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people:
they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In
fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the
occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they
spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is
especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to
relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the
government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in
small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out,
causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as
impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and
large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here
is a description from a Washington Times story
:

“Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying
fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the
streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

“The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National
Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings
and gunfire….

“Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300
Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans
with shoot-to-kill orders.

“‘These troops are…under my orders to restore order in the
streets,’ she said. ‘They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded.
These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing
to do so if necessary and I expect they will.’ ”

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this
article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests,
riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a
rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling
at
them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an
excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes
unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate
them,
causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What
causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the
Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing
further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying
to
help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on
a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox
News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She
studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is
located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert
Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in
America. “The projects,” as they were known, were infamous for
uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since,
mercifully, been demolished .)

What Sherri was getting from last night’s television coverage
was a whiff of the sense of life of “the projects.” Then the
“crawl”–the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen
on most news channels–gave some vital statistics to confirm this
sense:
75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the
hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were
from the city’s public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an
additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated
that
the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city’s
jails–so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a
significant overlap between these two populations–that is, a large
number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects,
and
vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans
when the deluge hit–but they were trapped alongside large numbers of
people from two groups: criminals–and wards of the welfare state,
people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and
self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep–on
whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of
wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent
incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total
evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be
necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of
city
officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and
patronage to political supporters–not to ensure a lawful, orderly
evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In
fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush,
for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New
Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is
an
execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail
, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the
chaos on American “individualism.” But the truth is precisely the
opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite
of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological
consequences of the welfare state. What we consider “normal” behavior
in
an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and
take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values
respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it
takes
to overcome the difficulties they face. They don’t sit around and
complain that the government hasn’t taken care of them. They don’t use
the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow
men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry
about saving their houses and property? They don’t, because they don’t
own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their
businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried
about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But
living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state–and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it
sustains and encourages–is the man-made disaster that explains the
moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story
that
no one is reporting.
———-
End of story.

MY RESPONSE:

Dear Aunt Patsy (I’m assuming that it was you who sent this forward and not
Uncle Randy even tho his name is on your account…)

Wow, You know that I love you, but. I don’t think that you could have
offended me any more if you had tried
to….

Did you know, I’m one of those “welfare parasites”? Did you know I receive
food stamps…Energy assistance…Pennsylvania Access healthcare (state-paid
insurance. The kind that us parasites have to get because we can’t afford
anything else.) As well as Medical Assistance for people With Disabilities
(MAWD)?

Did you know I’ve sat in the welfare office and been talked to as if I were
3 years old, because it was assumed I was uneducated, illiterate or
otherwise stupid because I was seeking public assistance? Did you know that
when they realized I was educated- had a degree and was in the process of
earning another- their tune changed REAL quick. Suddenly I was talked to
like I was an Equal. This country equates poor with inhuman. Poverty with
stupidity and laziness.

Did you know that 20% of the population- the wealthiest- hold 85% of
household wealth (cars, houses, televisions…). The rest of society? The
other 80%? We get to share the remaining 15% Did you know that if you work
full time at minimum wage, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to make enough money to survive?
“Ok” people say “the people working min. wage jobs need to go back to school
and get an education so they can get higher paying jobs.” Sure. Ok. Then
who’s gonna serve your burgers? Who’s gonna bag your groceries? Who’s gonna
stock all of the shelves at the grocery stores that you shop at? *someone*
has to do those jobs. So is it the min. wage workers’ fault that even if
they work full time at these necessary jobs that they’re not getting paid
enough to live off of? No…no, I don’t think so. How about raising minimum
wage?

We are NOT a classless society. We are NOT a middle class nation. As a
matter of fact, the middle class is shrinking. People aren’t moving up in
society- it’s a downward movement in income. Our economic system does NOT
benefit everyone. And everyone does NOT have an equal chance to succeed.

Economic class is not something we chose. It’s thrust upon us.

This article, whether or not you realise it, insinuates that people on
welfare are lazy people with no values and no interest in adopting values.
It doesn’t take in consideration the WHOLE situation.

It insinuates that all of those in jail are there because they’re hardened
criminals. Do they take in to account the fact that probably many, MANY of
those inmates were in jail because they were wrongfully accused, due to race
or social class?

No. I don’t think people should be looting, raping, killing. But people
fight when they are caged, welcome to Darwinism- ya know, survival of the
fittest? They are trapped in a city because they couldn’t afford cars, they
had no relatives to go stay with, they couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel or
motel for a few days. They are trapped in a city where resources are now
limited. What should they do? Just drink the polluted water and pray that
death comes sooner? Or fight to survive? The article asks, why are they
attacking the people who are trying to help them….Maybe because the people
trying to help them now are the same people that step on the “parasites” as
they are called, EVERY OTHER DAY.

No, I’m not trying to…justify the violence or condone it. And if the point
of that article was to illustrate how American society traps people in the
system…how even if they try as hard as they can, they may not rise above
poverty, because wealth is in NO way distributed equally….if it was trying
to illustrate that the violence, that the “parasite” mentality has been
perpetuated by the societal mentality held in america rather than the people
stuck in poverty….If it was trying to do any of that? If failed. Horribly.
The author claims that the Canadian journalist is supercilious? The author
needs to look in the mirror. In my opinion.

Love,
Your working TWO jobs but STILL below-poverty level neice who is therefore
seen as a worthless burden to society, [Echo]

I’d love to get real emails from you. But please don’t send me any more of
these kinds of forwards, as they increase my already-at-the-end-of-my-rope
stress level. I’m sure the tax-payers don’t want to sink any more money into
antidepressants, antianxiety, antihypertensives for me. It would just
reinforce my parasitic nature dontcha know….
__________________________________________________
October gave a party; The leaves by hundreds came –
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples, And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet, And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing, Professor Wind the band. -George Cooper
———————–

-end of rant-
)for now(