Sub-Human
From Mark Steyn:
"In the Atlantic Monthly a few years back, Robert D. Kaplan went to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other failed jurisdictions of West Africa and concluded that many of the "citizens" of these "states," roaming the streets raping and killing, belonged to a phenomenon called "re-primitivized man." Anyone watching TV in recent days will have seen plenty of "re-primitivized man," not in Liberia or Somalia, but in Louisiana. Cops smashing the Wal-Mart DVD cabinet so they can get their share of the booty along with the rest of the looters, gangs firing on a children's hospital and on rescue helicopters, hurricane victims being raped in the New Orleans Convention Center. . . . If you're minded, as many of the world's anti-Americans are, to regard the United States as a depraved swamp, it was a grand old week: Mother Nature delivered the swamp, but plenty of natives supplied the depravity."
Why is anyone surprised by this?
posted by Presley Bennett @ 9/04/2005
4 comments
4 Comments:
As a community, New Orleans comes off looking pretty bad in this. Even before this disaster, I've heard Louisiana describes as "a third world country within the boundries of the United States." My wife is from N.O. so I have had occasion to visit the area quite extensively in the past and I always felt as though I was truly a foreigner, though I could never quite put my finger on the reason. In good times it was what gave the city it's special charm.
Within the last 15 or 20 years though, the place began to become a bit scary.
It should be noted that this is a city where corruption is rampant, particularly within the police department. It's a city where the citizens simply do not trust the police and for good reason. When there is widespread distrust of the police in a community, what you have is the recipe for what we are now seeing.
Am I surprised? In retrospect not really. Horrified at the speed in which this degeneration happened, but not really surprised.
Katrina has succeeded in exposing the rotton core of New Orleans and I sincerely hope that the "new" New Orleans will be sans what was becoming synonymous with the "old" one.
As I posted earlier, I think what happened in N.O. would happen in just about any big city in the U.S.A., maybe anywhere in the world. Who are we kidding? 50 years of social programs funded with our tax dollars has done nothing to change basic human nature.
What? You mean "the War on Poverty" has not yet been won, after all of the trillions we have spent on it?
Why did we not have an exit strategy?
Quagmire!
The poor are always with us. I'm not meaning to be flippant. I don't think it's about the poor. I think what has happened in N.O. is about the wicked. And they are definitely always with us.
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