Hurricane Fallacies

I’ve been hitting the dreaded random entry button a few times, and I’ve, not too surprisingly, found a multitude of entries contemplating the

New Orleans tragedy. Which, let me state clearly, was, indeed, an absolute tragedy in every sense of the word, and my thoughts go out to everyone involved. There’s just a few points I’d like to make.

Now then.

Fallacy #1: Hurricane Katrina is the biggest tragedy in, like, forever. 
No. Just last week over 1,000 were killed in Iraq due to a stampede, something roughly comparable to the

New Orleans disaster, and it hardly got any press at all. Of course, even more comparable was the Tsunami disaster in

Asia, where around 200,000 were killed, something that makes the few thousand killed by Katrina seem insignificant. So, by mourning the losses of the Katrina victims more, assuming that you lost no actual friends or family, you are essentially implying that American lives are more important than other lives. Which is just bigoted.

Fallacy #2: You shouldn’t complain about the Hurricane being handled poorly unless you’ve given money to charity.
This is just flawed logic. Ok, lets accept for a moment that complaining about the government being absolutely incompetent is bad and that you should never ever do it. Fair enough. However, giving money to a charity isn’t suddenly going to make complaining more effective. It’s a free country, you don’t have to pay money to give your opinion.

Fallacy #3: You shouldn’t blame George Bush and the government for poor handling of Katrina because that doesn’t help. You should just give money instead.
Now, don’t get me wrong, giving money to the Red Cross or another charity is certainly a wonderful thing, and I definitely support anyone who ever has, whether it be for Katrina or any other reason. However, the idea that you should just shut up and give money isn’t a very good one. Giving money to the victims of this disaster is the only way to help them, yes, however, looking into ways that this disaster could have been better handled is the only way to prepare for the next one. Being short-sighted is the reason Katrina became such a fiasco to begin with.

Ok, I’m ending this at three, because, really, there’s no sense in going on and on about it. If you want that, there’s certainly always your local news coverage.

Now, please, go out and give to your charity of choice. And do it while bitching about what a lousy government we have.