Here we go again.

If you look closely at what happened when the levees failed in New Orleans, and in the two-plus years since, you will obviously have to retract your argument. First there is no obvious comparison between what is happening in the midwest today and what happened in New Orleans. Put, say, Omaha under fifteen feet of water for a month and perhaps then we can talk.

As to self-reliance, while the fuckmooks at FEMA say around trying to figure out what they would do if a Category Five hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, Louisiana declared a state of emergency and a mandatory evacuation, mobilized the Louisiana National Guard and requested assistance from the Guard of the other 49 states. Oh, and they asked the Feds for help, all days before the storm struck or the levees failed.

While FEMA sat around looking for their emergency plan binders, which they could no more find with two hands than their own asses, Louisiana dispatched the Wildlife and Fisheries service with their many small boats to begin rescue operations. The people of Louisiana, with their own small boats, mobilized themselves unasked as what is now called the Cajun Navy to assist. Most people rescued were not hoisted out by the Coasties but were rescued by their fellow citizens.

Since you seem to have missed the welfare reforms of the 1990s, many if not most of the people who remained in the city are our substantial working poor. Many (tens of thousands) own no cars. They had no ready means to evacuate. Some stayed in their homes and others went to the shelter of last resort at the Superdome. Most brought all the food and water they had as requested. Everyone was told to bring a three day’s supply, after which FEMA was supposed to ride to the rescue if necessary, per the emergency plan approved by FEMA. People tried to walk out and rescue themselves but were stopped by the police of mostly white suburban Gretna, La. who did not want the predominantly black people of New Orleans walking out through their city.

In the years since we are largely rebuilding the city ourselves, with the help of tens of thousands of volunteers from all across the country. If the $115 billion aid figure bandied about, most went to FEMA to pay for their fabulous assistance. More went to FEMA-awarded no-bid contracts for debris removal and work of that sort, at prices that shocked the well experienced emergency managers of Florida. In Mississippi, those inflated contracts when to a company with which Governor Haily Barbour had a private business consulting arrangement. Can you say kick-back, so save your Louisiana is corrupt thought.

Another large chunk of that money went to pay the Federal government’s legally and contractually obligated flood insurance payouts. New Orleans and Louisiana has the highest rate of flood insurance participation in the nation, which dwarfs that of most other states (and dwarfs the participation rate in crop insurance of midwest farmers). The reconstruction of New Orleans is being funded by insurance that we dutifully paid for, by maxed out credit cards and cashed out 401ks, and by our own blood, sweat and tears.

You may take your overtly racist “oh, real Americans are so much more self-reliant than those people down there” argument and file it where the sun does not shine.

Since the strm

Thanks for taking the time to comment, Mark. I went back through to reread my post and I can see where you’re coming from. I really didn’t mean to disparage the people of New Orleans, but really the mentality of dependence on the state for protection that pervades much of America today.

And that’s not to say that this same dependence isn’t prevalent in the flooded states today. I really wanted to get out in front of the argument that the disaster response comparison between the two situations was indicative of a rooted racism in the government’s attitude towards the deep south versus the heartland. To be clear, I don’t believe there is a racist element to either disaster response. I thought Kanye West was an idiot for saying the George Bush doesn’t care about black people on national television (I think it could legitimately be argued at this point that Bush doesn’t give a shit about any of us indiscriminately).

I would never draw a line between states and say, “These are real Americans and those guys aren’t.” I do believe that we’re dealing with different cultures and different paradigms, hence different communal responses to social disasters. I still hold that the effectiveness of the response is directly proportional to the mindset of the general populace and how prepared they are to deal with a situation. I think JD is right in his comment above–a lot of people got caught with their pants down during Katrina and it showed in the overall response (especially the overall dependence on FEMA which nobody knew at the time was going to be a cosmic joke). So maybe it’s an unfair comparison since we’ve had almost three years to process and prepare for new disasters but I think these are comparisons we still need to make as thinking citizens of this country.

Thanks again for the comment, Mark.

I have (soon to be) family in Iowa and friends that lived in Baton Rouge during Katrina. And trust me, what is happening in the midwest is substantially more than 0.01% of NO and substantially more significant. A large difference is that there are more people in NO than in these rural areas (and even the populated areas, for that fact) of the midwest. There is a much more dense population in NO; dense as in people per sq ft and dense as in “it’s wise to build a city below sea level”, but I digress. Because there are more people there, there was more attention. But wait until the tens, or hundreds, of thousands of acres of corn, wheat and soy that are drowning now are not harvested or have a miniscule yield. Wait until the cost of food goes up even more because of it. Wait until our stockpiles of those food stuffs are lowered even more. Hope there is not a blight, bug or drought that sweeps the area next year.

Productivity and dependence upon/importance of the region: that’s the difference between the 2008 Midwest floods and Katrina.

Yeah, I certainly don’t want to descend to the Amistad versus Auschwitz debate on who suffered more the Iowans or New Orleaneans. Everyone affected deserves our compassion as human beings first, regardless of their citizenship, race, or whatever the flock.

But I agree with FB that the economic implications will likely be far negatively greater to the overall country than the destruction of the city of New Orleans (which I’ve seen first-hand when I was there building homes in the upper 9th Ward with Habitat for Humanity in January of ‘07).

I agree with JD also–there are alot of douche bags out there still in the deep south looking for their handouts. I guess the days of farmers eating dirt in the dustbowl before they’d take a handout from Dirty Uncle Sammy is a never was in the Big Easy. That being said, there are also a lot of Iowa farmers sucking at the teat of subsidized farming in our country which is about as bad to me as the waste and fraud of FEMA. Those farmers are still going to get paid while the rest of the country pays market prices for goods that will be in short supply–tax payers will get screwed from both ends on this on and that’s what will make the difference between the two disasters.