The Daily Plunge

Another sign of the Apocalypse: Paula Zahn discussing the Apocalypse.

I purposely shunned the news media this past week, particularly cable news, simply to avoid the incessant caterwauling over Katrina, five years later. Whilst flipping through the channels the other day, even the briefest glimpse of some “news” organization patting itself on the back and replaying its horrifically inaccurate coverage from five years ago caused my eyes to bleed.

Fortunately, I had beer and a Wii handy, so all was soon forgotten. I won’t enumerate every single journalistic misdemeanor and felony perpetrated on the American public in the aftermath of Katrina since W. Joseph Campbell, a professor in Communications at American University, did such a fine job in a recent post at Media Myth Alert.

However, I will say that Katrina may rank as the most overblown natural disaster in the history of mankind, puns and hyperbole very much intended. I’m certainly not downplaying the death and destruction wrought by the hurricane, but I will quibble with the way in which it has been portrayed.

Environmentalists love it because it supposedly represents Mother Nature’s disgust at humankind for having the audacity to drive cars. Race hustlers love it because it supposedly represents how the powerful white establishment could care less about blacks.

What Katrina actually represents is America’s slide into a culture of dependency. We should not be asking how the government can bail us out whenever something goes awry. We should be asking how we can better prepare ourselves so that we don’t need the government’s help.

Moreover, if we should expect any form of competence from government, it should be local and state government, not the Federal government. We are far more likely to be able to hold our local representatives to account than we are some pork-bellied beast thousands of miles away from the action.

Katrina did not expose the failure of the federal government; it exposed the failure of local government to have any semblance of sense before, during and after the storm. The old, tired saw, worn down by constantly sawing through the media’s BS, is that Katrina showed how foolish and inept the Bush administration was.

Even if this were true, it doesn’t change the fact that people need to take responsibility for themselves. Of course that’s an old-fashioned and outdated way of thinking. Also falling out of favor is the notion that we not only help ourselves, but that we help our neighbor when our neighbor is in need. With my boots on the ground, so to speak, I am much more likely to be in a position to help and to do so effectively.

What happens when we cede this responsibility to government is that we tend to care less about our neighbor.”Oh, Uncle Sam’s got his back. I can go back to playing Mario Kart,” we say to ourselves as the flood waters rise.

Today, the average Spaniard is 20 percentage points less likely than the average American to classify himself as “religious,” gives less than half as much to charity, and volunteers about one-fifth as often. And Spain has the highest level of charitable giving per capita in Western Europe (and has church attendance rates that are among the highest as well).

I’ll leave it to you to decide what these statistical variances between the United States and Europe mean and how they relate to the entitlement culture personified by Katrina then and Katrina five years later.