This is my sentiment actually, word for word. As I said earlier, the stereotypes are pretty mild.
But I gotta wonder why a fifty year old man chooses to live unemployed and broke in a hotel room watching TV everyday and not even try and contribute to society, get his old life back or go back home to his roots, property and family in NOLA. I gotta wonder what agency his caseworker is employed by. I wonder why he turned down a free ticket home back in February, which doesn’t make sense to me at all, unless (this is just a guess) he was still waiting on his $9,000 in housing aid to come through first, or underwent some specific trauma or loss. But hey, these kinds of facts would balance the story and get in the way of a good fuming. We’d all like a happy ending and for these folks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Being “lazy” is too simplistic.
That’s where popping by for just 30-40 mins a day has its advantages. Disadvantage: you can’t read everything. (I nearly wrote “anything” - I must stop taking those truth pills.)
Like individual humans, the inherent value of societies is also based on what those societies do. The man’s death might have little or no negative effect on society. Creating a social standard that ignores the realities that cause his death is a negative effect, in my opinion. Why should I be a contributing member of this cooperative effort that creates society, if society demonstrates to me that it cares only what I produce, and not at all for me as an individual?
The downside is the jungle. Darwin I can have without taxes, service to social good, or limiting myself by legal systems. If you want to have one, your society must prove its worth.
Like roger thornhill, I would really like to hear those comments.
I don’t have anything to add on the subject of implied racism or sensational reporting. But just speaking as someone who has friends who are still not back in New Orleans because of Katrina, I have at least one thing to add about the actual topic of New Orleans people getting their lives back:
It can be pretty damn hard to find housing in New Orleans nowadays. Everyone seems to be assuming that you can just take your ticket home and find yourself a new place to live, but if you were an apartment-dweller and you don’t have much money (and that means a real income, not FEMA money), it’s not going to be that easy. Even if you could find a place to live, if your neighbors and your neighborhood are gone, it’s still be pretty daunting to just go back and try to start again from nothing. The social and economic structure of the city took a huge hit and things are still pretty chaotic.
Aside from the difficulty of finding affordable housing, the levees are certainly no stronger right now than they were last summer. I know at least one person who really, really wants to move back, but she’s planning to stay away until hurricane season is over. A lot of us who aren’t in or from the area hit by Katrina seem to be forgetting this, but just because time has passed and Halliburton and their associates are raking in the government cash doesn’t mean that everything’s back to normal. Things are still very, very fucked up, not only in New Orleans but in a wide swath of the Gulf region. This is not fixed yet, not by a long shot.