Hurricane Relief and It's Problems

I've been watching terrible pictures, and heard terrible stories out of New Orleans. All of us our saturated with the raw footage, and we are torn with having it so easy while so many have it so bad. Today's storylines, though, seem to be more about finger pointing, particularly partisan blame placing. 'Race', 'poor', 'urban' - all epitaphs thrown around today to describe the reasoning behind the particularly slow and seemingly ineffective relief efforts. Interestingly, the complaints about how the poor and urban (be they black or white) seem to center on how governments coulda, shoulda, woulda done more prior to the hurricane hitting the gulf coast, and how it's entirely unfair and wrong that all of these people are trapped in down town New Orleans. After all of the talk, I've got a question. What about the responsibilities of these people to live with their decisions to stay putt in the face of terrible odds? What I hear, when it's all said and done, is that these poor souls are the victims, not of a natural disaster, but of someone's political agenda, victims of someone else's classism and racism, and how if the government really cared about all people, they would've been taken care of before the storm even hit.

Now, let's get one thing straight. I agree that the relief efforts have seemed paltry at best. Heck, even the President realized he had to criticize the efforts today, even as he prepared to visit the storm stricken areas. But it's not just the national government's problem. What is the mayor of New Orleans wagging his finger at anyone, when he could've moved all sorts of resources, not to mention people, out of the city before the levees broke? Why didn't the Governor of Louisiana have the National Guard standing by with all sorts of resources and relief aid, when they knew this was going to be the mother of all storms? Why didn't they just order the complete evacuation of the city? Yes, these people are victims, but me thinks that there's fair blame to spread around to the local and state leaders well before we get to el Presidente.

One last thing... with regard to the people who are stuck in the city... what about their own responsibilities at choosing to stay? I'm not trying to point the finger back at them, but it seems to me to be the unasked question. They need a lot of help. And the Federal and State governments need to do as much as is feasible and maybe then some. But the bottom line is, as much as the different levels of goverment knew the crap was about to hit the fan, so did the people. They chose to stay. These people need our compassion, but they don't need us treat them as if they are merely stupid victims of someone else's dislike for poor, urban people of color. The real people who are causing problems here are the ones who are treating these people as if they were stupid for not realizing the danger, for being stupid enough to have to wait for the local government to tell them to leave. I think that's far worse than any other 'ism' I've heard leveled so far. God created government to take care of its citizens, but before that, He created us to take personal responsibility for our own being. The people of New Orleands deserve our compassion and tears, and anything we can do to eleviate their suffering now is the least we can do. But I hope after it's all said and done, someone will have the guts to ask and pursue the question of, "Why didn't you get out when you heard it was coming?"