If that’s all the proof you need, I don’t know what to say, I guess. It’s silly. I mean it just smacks of putting your fingers in your ears and singing Mary Had a Little Lamb at the top of your lungs.
Your communication suggestions, especially considering how soon as you think they should have happened, were just, well, ludicrous. Leaflets? Oh my Christ, that’s bad.
So you can just go on living in your segregated America. Meanwhile, I’ll be living here in just regular old America. The same place where sometimes people fuck up royally, bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it and sometimes the former are white and the latter are black.
I got that; but I suspect that most people want the aid, not an explanation why it’s not coming. It’s like getting one of those “your call is important to us” messages. Such a letterdrop would require, as I noted, a huge amount of resources; resources presumably diverted from actual relief efforts. I refer you to this thread, upset (rightfully, IMO) about using relief resources to pass out flyers. Your plan would use exponentially more resources. Finally (and almost tangentially), since most people don’t recognize Bush’s sig, and it’s easily faked anyway, I strongly suspect putting it on leaflets would be seen as hubris.
The point of this is not just that some plan you thought up off the top of your head is bad; it’s to drive home that all plans are difficult in this situation, and that reducing it to “Monday. Thursday.” as if that proved something it is simplistic in the extreme.
This is brilliant, I’m going to use it in other threads:
Diogenes the Cynic: …and as you can see, Senator Rhodam-Clinton’s proposal would decrease taxes but have a net increase in federal income due to less overhead. Kid Chameleon: But she arrived in Syracuse on Monday and left on Thursday. Diogenes the Cynic: So? Kid Chameleon: Monday. Thursday. Diogenes the Cynic: Oh, I see now. Yeah, that was a stupid idea. I’m going to vote for Jeb now!
I’d rather have some urging to be calm and assurances that help is on the way unheeded than to learn NOTHING was communicated from authorities for days. That’s a recipe for panic. To me, the willingness to go before the people and make plans and assurances is a sign of leadership and not, to my mind, an unreasonable expectation. But then, maybe I’m just weird that way. I certainly didn’t expect this President to remain sitting on his ass being read to in a photo-Op for however many minutes it was after hearing about attacks on the Wolrd Trade Centers and Pentagon …
I don’t know know, but if you’ve been stuck in the Superdome and suddenly get word you can leave for shelter elsewhere where there’s running water food and electricty I’m gonna take a wild stab in the dark and guess that stadium would be emptied.
Agreed: some people are quicker on the uptake than others.
My understanding must be narrow, because I haven’t heard any in-depth self-recriminations from top officials in this fiasco yet. I don’t get it. I don’t get the delays, the botched plans, the (apparent) miscommunications, the failure on the city and statewide level to execute their pre-planned evacuations, why there was a parking lot full of flooded buses that should have been used to evacuate people.
I know one thing: in any crisis management, information needs to be shared quickly and clearly to those in need in regard to what to do next. Looking for leadership and hearing nothing for days exacerbated what stress and panic these people did face. I don’t blame Bush for the storm. I blame him, Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco largely for the immediate aftermath.
But there are areas that still have not recieved aid and there are areas that recieved aid after New Orleans. Isn’t easier to look at this and see a poorly executed aid plan and remarkable confusion than running right to racism in action?
UrbanChic. What logistically would have been the problem with my suggestions? If you have experience in these matters please tell me something. The leaflet idea has merit, I just don’t like the idea of a bunch of firefighter volunteers passing them out. Having several planes (or helicopters) do it in the timely manner, from the president, means more than than hearing nothing.
**furt. ** The sight of 500,000 leaflets falling from the sky explaining what exactly happened, ending rumors, urging calm, warning looters and shooters to cease and promising aid is on its way on a strict timetable isn’t as resource-draining as you seem to think it would be. I’ve but together a student newspaper in a week with a staff of five; I can design a leaflet with federal resources to hand off to some pilots to drop. Bush’s signature could be faked? Who would doubt that half-a-million leaflets falling from military aircraft wouldn’t be the president’s doing?
kidchameleon.
Harborwolf. I’ve said it was botched. I’ve said Bush doesn’t care about poor black Democrats. I called him indifferent. Many times. Check ANY of my many posts over the last few days and see where I *ever * said BushCo was racist and please bring it to my attention. Indifferent and inept is quite bad enough, thank you.
Huh. No response from Askia on my previous post. I guess maybe you ascribe omnicient powers to the President. You know, the part about 1) nobody aware of people huddled in the Convention Center: and 2) the mayor giving the impression the people in the Superdome would be able to return home after a day or so.
Askia, have you ever heard the phrase, “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance?”
Hell, if you’re gonna go to all the trouble of dropping shit en masse over the disaster area, why not drop care packages instead of just leaflets? (Didn’t they do that in Afghanistan?)
Of course you can --that’s the easy part. But you seem to be under the impression that printing up a million leaflets and distributing them over hundreds of square miles is something you can do in half an hour.
To begin with, “ending rumors” is dependant on knowing what the rumors are, and then knowing what the best solution is. How they were supposed to learn what the most prevalent rumors were on the street – among inaccessible people – on Monday afternoon, I have no idea. One of the more obvious symptoms of the monumental clusterfuck we’ve seen has been that the authorities didn’t know what advice to give. IIRC, even on Monday the city was still selling the superdome as a shelter; it was only later that it became obvious that that wasn’t working. You gonna send out a new set of flyers every time the plan changes?
“Urging calm?” “Well, shit, here I was all set to panic because I’ve got no food or water and my infant is running a fever, but this here piece o’ paper from the sky tells me everything’s gonna be fine. Guess I got nothin’ to worry about…”
“Warning looters and shooters to cease” Sweet mercy, woman, what planet are you on where violent criminals are deterred by leaflets?
But all that is beside the point: Given that the damaged area was a couple hundred miles long, and many miles inland, and that millions of people were affected, how many leaflets do you think you’ll need? How many people are you going to need to run off those millions of (“preferably biodegradable”) leaflets on copiers/printing presses? How many aircraft will you need to drop those millions of leaflets? How long to set up those aircraft for leaflet drops? (Please tell me your idea isn’t to have some guy standing in an open doorway tossing out fistfuls of paper.) How many sorties will it take to cover the area? How many people will it take to load, fuel, and service those aircraft over a period of days? Is there anything else those people might do instead?
Sweetheart, you’re embarrasing yourself. You hate George Bush. Swell. Nobody here is thrilled with his performance. But continuing to cry “racism” with no evidence or even a coherent argument to support it just makes you look like a fool. Showing such an obvious ignorance of logistics doesn’t help.
Quit while you’re behind, before you end up with the credibility of Scott Plaid.
Just so as we’re clear, like I said, UrbanChic - I wasn’t suggesting that you implied any such thing. I really wasn’t targeting you at all, like I said in the post in question. I was just using your post as a convenient jumping off point for my own peripherally-related rant.
And Askia, huh? I was bitching about other people, like WeirdDave, suggesting to you that race is a dead issue. You obviously have never once suggested that racism no longer exists. However, other folks on the boards have done so, and like I said, I saw it in particular in conversations with you. Like this: you, Askia, discussed a racial issue. Joe Q. Random Doper responds with “I’m so sick of hearing about racism! It’s not a significant problem nowadays” and so forth. I’m upset at the Joe Q. Random Dopers out there, not at you.
Care to link a post in which I said this (“race is a dead issue”)? I don’t think you can, Sparky, but let’s see your evidence if you’re going to accuse me of something so stupid. I’ve taken issue with Askia about his…peculiar and self serving definition of racism, and said bluntly that I think he’s full of shit when he suggests that race was the reason for a slow federal response in New Orleans, but I’ve never said that racism didn’t exist in America today. In fact, I think it’s a real problem, but it infuriates me when wannabe martyrs like Askia trot out the race card when discussing relatively minor issues, or play it to serve their own twisted agendas as in the case of New Orleans; such despicable exaggerations and impassioned wailing over imagined slights serve only to camouflage the very real racial issues facing this country today behind a screen of fabricated outrage and indignation. In short, it’s disgraceful and it’s counterproductive in a way that is perfectly illustrated in the fairy tale of the boy who cried wolf. It’s not even close to being part of the solution, but it is a huge part of the problem.
Interesting piece of information on CNN just now… not exactly an exhaustive and verified study but…
Greater New Orleans has the largest native population in the US. That is to say, it has the largest concentration of people who were born, live and intend to die within it’s geographic (proximity) borders (whatever that means).
Don’t know how unique this fact is to this (US) area but reports say that an exceptionally large number of refugees have never been out of the area and never would have left had it not been for the disaster.
Kinda helps to explain the (stubborn) reluctance exhibited by many people to leave their homes during the evacuation efforts.
