October 12, 2005
The Reverend John C Rants Again
Our old pal John C from Heathen World who many of us knew and loved as the Reverend Furious Fury Strikes again. John sure can rant much like the way Elvis popped pills. Love it or hate it, we've missed John's take on current events. Now he's back and his target the powers that be and the powers that lacked around the recent tragedies in NOLA.
there are a couple facts worth mentioning ...
huge difference between a category 4 hurricane and a category 2 hurricane
army core of engineers in charge of new orleans flood barriers.. barriers in obvious disrepair in spite of army core warnings due to lack of federal money for many years. not a republican or democratic thing.. probably not a racist thing either.. we can thank the screwed up priorities of screwed up politicians elected by a largely uncaring public.
new orleans paper ran huge story about the potential disaster the year prior. the local newspaper was evidently more accurate than federal govt.
new orleans mayor took dumb risk by not ordering evacuation earlier
bush made money available to fema before the storm. on one hand, fema is no longer a cabnet level entity due to bush's reorganization, so the director had to go through more red tape to get the army there. on the other hand, the fema director was too stupid to do anything useful regardless of the situation.
bush was pummelled so badly after the first hurricane that he and everyone else did everything possible to insure texas was not a repeat. if houston had been hit by a category 4 first, it would have been bad.
regarding mayor of new orleans asking people to repopulate .. he quickly reversed himself when danger from the 2nd hurricane was obvious. a week later people were indeed coming back to town.
there was a lot of awful and herioc activity in new orleans.. basically only the negative was reported.
some of the awful activity was the fault of criminal residents .. some was the fault of paranoid neighboring communities. many new orleans residents were forced at gunpoint to stay in that awful situation instead of being allowed to walk along the highway to somewhere that at least had dry ground and food.
super dome chaos was insanely overblown by media. the only person shot there was a national guard member that shot himself in the leg. one guy killed himself and 5 or 6 others died of non-violent causes.
only the army was prepared for a situation of that magnitude with no working infrastructure. federal and local civilians were equally helpless.
now a bit of theory..
making this a democrat / republican thing is silly. that choice is like pepsi vs. coke. both made with secret recipes, artificially sweet, not good for us, and heartily drank by an evidently stupid public. we as a nation get what we deserve .. and lately that has not been pretty.
i guess it's natural for people to grab at intellectual crutches .. it's easy to get conspiratorial, racist, born again, satanic, nihilistic, angry, politically correct, criminal, survivalist, insane, conservative, liberal, anarchist, green, communist, nationalist, nazi, libertarian..
i've had friends over the years that fit all those descriptions .. all those friends watched out for themselves first, cared about others next, and looked down on people with different world views .. more alike than they realize.
let's face it. humans are not all that great at getting along with eachother.. the size of this planet helped for awhile.. now we're so damned clever we can fly everywhere and communicate with anyone, and we still suck at getting along.
on the other hand, my life is peaceful, and the variety of food and creature comforts avialable to my middle class salary is something the vast majority of humanity in all of history could only dream of. i don't know how long our little bubbles of prosperity will last. i just watch it all with amazement and try not to piss off anyone with a gun or a badge.
cheers to the crazy times,
john