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 Of course that’s an old-fashioned and outdated way of thinking.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.
The new symbol of government ineptitude?
I know I’m starting to beat a dead horse here, but American’s reaction to the oil spill is puzzling. The Democrats and the press made hay during Katrina and it appears they’re paying a political price now that they’re in power. The President has spent his entire time in office blaming Bush for everything. Well, if all the problems (real or imagined) occurred because Bush was a moron why isn’t Obama solving these problems?
A month and a half after the spill began, 69 percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll rate the federal response negatively. That compares with a 62 negative rating for the response to Katrina two weeks after the August 2005 hurricane.
The answer to my question above is simple. However, progressives have boxed themselves into a corner on this one. They believe in government. They’re more worried about the God people than government ineptitude. I believe in the separation of Church and State. What about the separation of Utopian belief in government and state?
I’m not sure when it will happen. Maybe it will never happen, but somewhere a smart politician is reading the tea leaves. In order to rally the American people our next great leader will have to call on us all to step up and conquer our problems. I think it’s too late for Obama. He just doesn’t grasp it. He may end up being a two-term president, but he’s not prepared to tackle our problems.
All of America’s great leaders have summoned the courage of the American people to solve the nation’s problems. The government was an ally, not the sole solution. That’s why the government looks so bad after Katrina and the Oil spill. The government will never be prepared for these kinds of crises. It is the challenge of our citizens. That is the American spirit. The government didn’t solve the Great Depression. Slavery didn’t end until the blood of thousands of Americans was spilled. Segregation lasted until Americans took to the streets to protest the injustice.
These colors don't... apologize?
Calvin Coolidge once said that “Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion.” Today the occasion is upon us and it’s time we call upon the heroism of the American people. Let’s quit apologizing for being the nation that invented the telephone, air travel, and the light bulb. We have never been a nation of apologists. No nation is free from sin and it’s only those who are too weak to lead that wish to wallow in our imperfection. We’re a nation of inventors, entrepreneurs, and hard workers. That’s the spirit of the American people, and it’s the spirit our leaders fail to grasp.
I have stated in the past that the media coverage on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was the worst in my lifetime. The narrative of that event is so firmly entrenched that it doesn’t even have to be explained. Just look at this story from the Associated Press which is about how the stimulus package ignores New Orleans.
It’s a significant change in tone from the Bush years, when any perceived slight of Katrina victims was met with charges that the Republican president who bungled the initial response to the disaster continued to callously ignore the Gulf’s needs years later.
Huh? The initial response wasn’t bungled. What are the facts from Katrina?
1) The city of New Orleans was missed by the center of the storm. The city itself experienced winds of a category 1 storm.
2) The levees broke and people who failed to evacuate were caught in their homes. Those people had adequate time and resources to leave. If there was any failure at all by government it was city and state governments who failed to evacuate their citizens.
3) The crime reported by the press during the disaster was exaggerated and in many cases didn’t happen at all.
4) The National Guard’s response to the storm was quicker that hurricanes Hugo and Andrew.
5) The state of Louisiana had many opportunities for four decades to fix the levies. The state is corrupt and environmentalists who were more concerned with alligators than humans blocked it.
Apparently Americans have watched too many Michael Bay movies and believe that rescue teams fall out of the sky immediately after a natural disaster. The journalists on the ground were more concerned with blaming Bush than covering the news. Bush’s biggest mistake was telling a crony Michael Brown he was doing a good job when it didn’t fit the media narrative. The press never apologized for all the mistakes they made and never held the local governments accountable for forty years of bad policy. Even the clown that claimed people were eating each other stood by his op-ed in the Huffington Post. There’s a lot of stuff Bush did as president that I don’t agree with, but the bugling of Katrina isn’t on the list. It’s a modern day fabrication.
The economy must be doing bad, with Bush, Iraq, the homeless, poverty, two Americas, Katrina, Plamegate, gas prices, public sentiment, and endless bad news no wonder 2/3rd of the country thinks the economy is bad. The only problem is that it is not true.
“Holy Katrina! The economy weathered two major hurricanes and in spite of that showed accelerated growth,” said Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. “I think what this shows is that fundamentally the economy was and is in really good shape.”
The expansion in gross domestic product in the July-to-September quarter, the strongest since the beginning of the year, also exceeded many analysts’ expectations. Before the report was released, they were forecasting the economy to clock in at a 3.6 percent annual rate.
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