Distaters in Colorado vs. New Orleans : Is this text racist or just right-wing rantin

Great Debates
1

I just received this text from one of those friends who sends you urban legends as if they were facts and smarmy, sentimental crap on a regular basis. The text is supposedly from the Denver Post. I would like to know what others think of it. Thanks to the internet, it will probably be distributed world-wide in a matter of days.

Can fellow dopers give me points to help rebut this text?

I think it is a right-wing, ultra-conservative rant that makes facile comparisons between two very different disasters as an excuse to bash anything related to social programs and government aid. And while I cannot exactly prove it is racist in intent (indeed, it does not even specifically mention New Olreans or any race) the implication is that African-Americans are whining parasites who just want handouts, compared to the self-reliant (generally white) people in Colorado.

I am especially confused by the line about the 48th parallel of lattitude, where he says:
“In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world’s social problems evaporate.”

This line is confusing because the entire state of Colorado, which he has just praised as being so self-reliant, lies about 900 km or 500 miles SOUTH of the 48th parallel. The 49th is the Canada-US border. Is the writer saying that Canada’s western provinces have no social problems??? :confused:

Or is the writer just confused about how latitude works (the lower the number, the further south in the northern hemisphere, stupid!) ? But to my mind, the North-South juxtaposition is meant to read “self reliant whites and whinning n___gers.”

Even if I am wrong about the racist angle, the general right-wing bashing of government programs and FEMA should be addressed, because he is comparing two very different disasters. The writer himself gives us a bit of ammunition when he says (emphasis mine): " Even though a Category “5” blizzard of this scale **has never fallen this early, we know it can happen ** and how to deal with it ourselves." In other words, the quantity of snow in Colorado may be large, but he fully admits that they have dealt with this before and therefore logically most homes are ready, there are government-owned infrastructures for snow removal, etc. Right off, this is different from the situation in New Orleans, is it not?

Comments anyone? Here is the text:

Denver Post:
This text is from a county emergency manager out in the central part of Colorado after today’s snowstorm.

WEATHER BULLETIN

Up here, in the Northern Plains, we just recovered from a Historic event – may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" – with a historic blizzard of up to 44" inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10's of thousands.

FYI:
George Bush did not come.
FEMA did nothing.
No one howled for the government.
No one blamed the government.
No one even uttered an expletive on TV
Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit.
Our Mayor did not blame Bush or anyone else.
Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else, either.
CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC did not visit - or report on this category 5 snowstorm. Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.
No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House.
No one looted.
Nobody - I mean Nobody demanded the government do something.
Nobody expected the government to do anything, either.
No Larry King, No Bill O’Rielly, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and No Geraldo Rivera.
No Shaun Penn, No Barbara Striesand, No Hollywood types to be found.
Nope, we just melted the snow for water.
Sent out caravans of SUV’s to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars.
The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn’t ask for a penny.
Local restaurants made food and the police and fire departments delivered it to the snowbound families. Families took in the stranded people - total strangers.
We fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Coleman lanterns.
We put on extra layers of clothes because up here it is “Work or Die”.
We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for ‘sittin at home’ checks.
Even though a Category “5” blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early, we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves.
“In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world’s social problems evaporate.”
It does seem that way, at least to me.

I hope this gets passed on.

Maybe SOME people will get the message. The world does NOT owe you a living.

2

Glurge, I do believe a very similar thing was passed around just after Katrina, and made the rounds here where it was summarily shot down. I don’t like the attitude expressed by it, as if the natural disasters other states have weathered have no merits at all.

3

It sounds like a re-worked version of an earlier internet pimple:

4

I live in Colorado. I waited in my warm house 'till the snow stopped, then I shovelled my driveway. They plowed the street. I drove to the grocery store and got food. My power went out one night for about three hours.

A little different that standing in your attic with no way out and watching the water rise over your head.

That email is rascist trash and I’ve seen it before (on here, I think), it comes out every time there is a blizzard.

Lets do away with farm subsidies where the people up north get paid for not growing crops and see what they think about welfare queens.

5

Well, the first and most obvious point regarding the biggest discrepancy between the two events is that a person who is trapped in their home by snow still has their home. They have not been forced out of it to avoid being washed away with the floods.

Among the minor changes this places on the situation is that no one actually has to be relocated anywhere else; no one has to find sources of food or water for people far removed from their homes. Barring the occasional downed power line (far more common in the ice storms at a later and warmer part of the year), no one is going to suffer a loss of heat or water. The stores to which one can trudge or snowmobile will not have been washed away. Most of them will be open for business (even if short staffed) to sell things. (And it is pretty hard to loot a store of 36" TVs or by pushing filled shopping carts when one has to force one’s way through snow drifts that have reached four feet in height.)

Heavy snow is an annual event and adding a few more inches does not make it unsurvivable in the way that a broken levee makes an entire neighborhood uninhabitable.

Also, the two following statements are lies:

There were any number of interviews with folks on the second morning of the first blizzard who were complaining of a lack of government response. (Probably not in the way that folks in N.O. were complaining, but the “nobody” claim is just a lie.)

6

Well, I “lived” through that blizzard and frankly it wasn’t in any ways compirable to the orders of magnitude of damage that I imagine Katrina was. To begin with, unlike Katrina, there was no need to evacuate the metro area. People assumed (rightly) that they simply needed to hang tight for 24-36 hours. There was comparably little or no property damage beyond limited structure collapse. On the order of millions (if that) compared to billions.

Also, I was unfortunately trying to get home on the Wednesday evening that the worst part of the storm hit and a bus took me all the way from downtown Denver to downtown Boulder. Sure, it took 8 hours, but to claim that all roads were closed is simply false. Finally, stranded motorists on US-36 were not rescued by do-gooding SUV drivers (I saw plenty of SUV’s littering the highway and blocking the plows) but by the National Guard.

All in all, I don’t think the situations are remotely similar. I’d gladly live through 1,000 of those snow-storms before dealing with a Hurricane Katrina.

7

It’s racist crap for the ignorant. For one thing, northern states have indeed asked for federal disaster relief after major blizzards. And the people do expect “the govenment” to do something. The state transportation departments and county road authorities have a lot of public money tied up in snow removal equipment and its use. Lastly, only a halfwit would compare 44" of snow to 10+ feet of water. This email is race-baiting, liberal-baiting, right wing-libertarian fruitcake hogwash.

8

Oh yeah, and I should add, I’m still complaining about Denver’s complete fucking inability to plow or at least salt even some semi-major side streets. All over Denver there are streets with six inch deep ice on the roads that has been rutted out to the pavement. God forbid you get a tire out of those ruts, you’ll be stuck until someone tows you out.

So, chalk me up for being one whiny bastard that is demanding more of a government response. Why does it take three weeks to thrown some mag-chlor down on a road?

9

“Is this text racist or just right-wing rantin”

Why can’t it be both?

10

Why do you think this guy’s a Libertarian? I’m a Libertarian, and I think that snow removal equipment is a wise expenditure of state money.

11

If I may post a reply to my own OP, I live in Canada and I have occasionally been snowed in, especially in my country home in the mountains. It is downright fun! I have a wood stove and a fireplace that I can use. You shut off a few non-essential rooms in the house to concentrate the heat. If the electricity is off, the pump to the well does not work, but it is very easy to melt snow on the wood stove. If the house is still a bit chilly you put on a big sweater.

Heavy snowfall does not do structural damage to 99.9% of houses, unlike massive flooding, and does not destroy or ruin the contents of your house.

12

He missed the “we didn’t wait for a week to be rescued from our roofs smelling our neighbours decompose in the water wondering if there was anyone out there looking for us in the midst of this raging river that once was our street”. Other than that, a wonderful little piece that puts in perspective the difference between a snow storm you have handled before and an unprecedented city-destroying event

13

I guess he’s never been to Russia, then. Heh.

14

You obviously have a lot to learn about us libertarians (small-l), especially those of us who are by no means “right-wing.” Would it surprise you that the only non-Democrat I ever voted for, on any level, was Gerald Ford?

Would you prefer some left-wing-liberal-commie-pinko fruitcake hogwash?

And by the way, please leave us “fruitcakes” out of it, as well.

15

Maybe explain to them that a 12 foot storm surge would translate into a 48 foot blizzard. Or that hundreds of thousands of people were without power or a house or a means to boil their fetid sewage laden water in. Maybe also clue them into the storms in the mid-west this summer that left half a million folks without power and where snowploughs had to be used to clear the streets of tree limbs. We all got by too, but we too, still had our houses.

16

“FEMA did nothing.”

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WEATHER/01/08/winter.storms.ap/index.html.

17

Tom, Sapo, and spazattak pretty much nailed it. I consider myself to be among the very luckiest of those impacted by Hurricane Katrina given that I had a home and job to return to. That said, I wound up leaving my home after taking about 7 hours to board up and pack whatever I could take along with me, not knowing that I wouldn’t sleep in my own bed for 48 days.

It’s never good when extremists on either end of the political spectrum attempt to win points for their arguments by playing off other people’s misery.

18

To add to what everyone else has said, part of the problem is that the Denver Metro area is ill-equipped to handle storms like this. I grew up in the U.P., and we would have had school during the first storm. Now, I know there’s big differences between clearing out a large city and places in the U.P., but the problem was more a lack of plowing resources (and plowing plans that depend on snow melting on residential streets) than the widespread destruction that occured with Katrina.

19

I grew up in “the snowiest area east of the Rockies” – sort of a rueful pride slogan, like “London can take it” during WWII. And yes, we regularly got socked with blizzards, dug ourselves out, and carried on. I can remember being in fourth grade with snowbanks above my head on my way to school, and I only lived a block from school.

On the other hand, three times in the 90s we were hit with severe ice storms, two of which left 99%+ of the area without electric power for a week or more. And owing to electrical pumps, electric igniters on furnaces, and so on, people were not only without power but without heat in 30-degree ambient temperatures during that period. But we were within our own homes, with water, able to make do. That did make a difference, but it was still manageable. Being evacuated from the area, with what little we could carry and no idea whether we’d ever be able to recover any possessions and nowhere to go beyond emergency shelters, would have been an order of magnitude worse.

There’s a big difference between what Ivorybill, and those even less fortunate than she**, went through, and the sorts of manageable disasters we and even Denver encountered. Using them for political/ideological gain is despicable – no matter from whom.

20

The e-mail is crap for a lot of reasons. Racist? I don’t necessarily think so. In fact, I get tired of people who try and find racism in anything and everything. As you say, it does not mention black people or even the people of New Orleans. Why go about trying to find racism in it? I think your view that this is racist says a lot more about your prejudices and biases than the “racism” of whoever wrote this e-mail.

To expand this a little, one can be upset with the reaction of New Orleans residents to Hurricane Katrina and not be racist. The desire for people to be more self-reliant is not about race – it’s about self-reliance. And if you want to disagree with that, fine. But to automatically say that people who believe in self-reliance are racists is avoiding a rational discussion of this issue.