City of the Dead
By Karen H. Pittman (09/05/05)
Watching New Orleans sink, I can almost feel the wheels turning in my brain, churning like those massive paddle wheels of yore that — alas! — once roiled the murky waters of the Mighty Mississippi as they propelled those genteel steamboats of a still gentler era past poor but proud N'Awlins, nestled down and dirty in the muddy Delta mouth . . . .
But as to the chaos occurring there now, permit me to be bluntly prosaic: I can't help it, but I have an inherent antipathy towards that certain sub-species of human animal that is now commandeering the streets of that fetid city, truly now a razed City of the Dead. I haven't the sufficiently impoverished vernacular to express just how thoroughly revolted I am by these mack daddies and gangstars and brazen bitches-with-FATitudes(-in-these-lowlife-latitudes) when I hear them squawking on-camera about how "ain't nobody did nuthin' fa us" — when they were told to leave! What else, in a forty-eight-hour window, could government do? Not only did their officials ask them to leave; not only did they beg them to leave — they ordered them to leave. The vast majority of these ambulatory refugees were able-bodied and could have at the very least abandoned their low-lying neighborhoods, as they were repeatedly commanded to do. For those who would or could not evacuate, they were advised to go to the Superdome, not as an ordinary shelter, mind you, but as an UNPREFERRED, NON-RED-CROSS-SANCTIONED, NON-GOODHOUSEKEEPING-GOLDEN-SEAL-OF-APPROVAL SHELTER OF LAST RESORT.
Now, I know that to folks who are functionally (and factually) illiterate, or who are fluent, not in the King's English but in Ebonics, the words "last resort" have no meaning. But whose fault is that? (I know. It's ours. It's "da gubmint's.")
I say let the gangstars drown in their toxic soup. If they aren't killed by Guardsmen, and they aren't rescued, they will soon be dead of typhoid. So be it. They chose.
Then, when the responsible folk roll back into town in the vehicles they bought and paid for with the sweat of their brow and which they then used to FOLLOW DA GUBMINT'S ORDERS TO EVACUATE — yea, verily, when the flood waters recede and these self-same self-sufficient folk roll back into town TO DO THE WORK that it will inevitably take to reclaim that city from the sea, they then can rightfully reclaim their Rolexes from the fish-limp, waterlogged wrists of our desperately drowning heroes, our modern-day Mongols and Visigoths, the street thugs and swamp kings of New Orleans. (Ow ow ow ow — she'll put a smell on you . . . .)
The simple fact is: We have forgotten God and lost our healthy, innate fear of Nature. Man is not the measure of all things. Foolish men in particular are a gauge of their own vapidity and vanity only.
To be less sardonic, let me state unequivocally my "official position" on the matter: To the extent that prioritization of response in the midst of an unprecedented calamity was required, those buses and helicopters should have been dispatched first to rescue all the people who obeyed the orders and were truly stranded, through no fault of their own — i.e., those who gathered at the Superdome (the way they were supposed to) and those who had no alternative but to remain where they were, in the nursing facilities and hospitals. For these folks, I feel nothing but heartfelt anguish and sympathy.
But my pity for the others — those who could have fled their flood-prone parishes but elected to stay behind, for whatever reasons (none of which are justifiable, especially when small children are put in harm's way by their parents' complacency and dereliction) — is tempered by a peculiar kind of flummoxed indignation. For instance, I was shocked to learn of Fats Domino's close call, but again, he made a choice, and one that very nearly proved lethal: His wife and daughter would have been the ones to pay the price for it.
The point is, people have to take personal responsibility for their own welfare. How can we fairly compare this to the tsunami, when in our case we knew, we had warning? I daresay the folks in the Twin Towers would have appreciated being notified two days beforehand that those airborne jet-missiles were going to be plunged into them at approximately 8:45am on Tuesday, September the 11th, 2001. How about the catastrophe in Galveston in 1900 when 8000-12,000 people perished because they had no idea that a hurricane was even coming? I'll bet those sluiced masses in Sri Lanka would have listened to Max Mayfield!
The distorted public reaction to this tragedy, devastating as it is, tells you all you need to know about how and why our contemporary culture and our own brand of Bread and Circus have failed us. They have killed us from within, because they have spoiled the people's attitudes and thinking. They have made perpetual victims of them, and made them stop taking responsibility for themselves. They have enslaved them all over again, this time to the all-mighty, but now all-too-obviously fallible, State. And worst of all, this slow corrosive contagion is not only fatal; it's lethal.
The twisted reasoning goes roughly like this: You tell me to go, I stay. When I stay, and you don't (or can't) come get me, I blame you. It's your fault. You deliberately didn't do it on purpose. Whatever I did or didn't do, at least I didn't do it on purpose; I couldn't help myself. I always have an excuse or reason, a mitigating circumstance; you, however, never do. You see, it's never my fault. It's always somebody else's. Anybody's but mine.
Well, if that's the case, you're always going to be at somebody's mercy anyway, and there apparently isn't a damned thing you can do about it. You have no control over your own destiny, so you may as well be dead.
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