First off, I still think people looting Nikes and shooting at rescue helicopters and setting things on fire are scum of the earth.

Second off, the media are stupid. And how in the world do they find such inarticulate people to interview? There has to be someone in the entire state of Louisiana that can put together a coherent sentence. Yet, Fox News (don't even ask why I was watching them) actually put a guy on air who completely stopped talking, turned around, and started staring into space in the middle of his interview on air. This might have actually been a blessing as you couldn't understand a word he was saying while he was talking and he seemed to have some sort of twitch. Fox News kindly said he "lost his train of thought." Um, that train has derailed.

Third off, I don't think the nice people are getting enough credit on this one. The entire state of Texas has pretty much rolled out the red carpet. (To the city of Houston, I give you two thumbs up and I'm sorry about all the bad things I said about your airport.) There are hundreds and hundreds of people on web bulletin boards offering room and board to people without homes. There are also people offering to help track down people with whatever resources they have. Individuals, small business owners and big corporations are scraping together cash and supplies. (Yeah, baby, 7 truckloads of Nutri-Grain bars. That's a lot of Nutri-Grain bars.)

But why isn't anyone saying anything nice? Not that the bad stuff isn't real. But I had to go searching on the web for nice things so that I didn't want to move to Canada because the much of New Orleans is behaving downright inexcusably and is quite frankly an embarrassment. The difference between this coverage and the coverage of 9/11 is like night and day. That was all about survival (despite the fact that thousands died) and heroes and banding together and kicking the bad guy's ass. Maybe people need a bad guy to unite against. You can't really kick a hurricane's ass.

I'm tired of hearing "where is the federal government?" and "why is this taking so long?". It's been 3 days, not 3 weeks. And there are no roads and no communication. The kind of money and people resources that it takes to coordinate this kind of relief also don't fall from the sky overnight. And there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people who need rescuing. (Many of whom aren't exactly making it easy on rescuers and ruining it for the rest.) And I know they're hungry and thirsty and hot and cranky and uncomfortable and I wouldn't want to be one of them in a million years. But people are doing the best they can to help out.

Could it be done better? Probably. But are the people complaining doing anything about it themselves? In most cases, probably not. So can't we divert efforts from criticizing and direct them instead to helping? I mean, something productive at least? Of course, I'm criticizing the criticizers so it's a bit of the pot calling the kettle black. But at least I'm not putting some mumbling lunatic on the airwaves to make my point.

OK, done now. G'night.

Posted by blueostrich at 9:57 PM
Something to say?