Originally Posted By vbdad55 <Who's going to spearhead the cleanup effort to ensure there's some safety measures imposed?< ah, local government ? ( OK to rip Feds but not them ? ) - local business/ builders etc ? Are the only people who can run this project to come from the Feds ?
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <Money is only part of the equation, Dabob. The other part is picking up your shovel or hammer and getting to work.> Yes, and thousands of New Orleans residents (including poor New Orleans residents) have done just that - there's this image we seem to have that everybody from the poor areas of NO is too lazy to do anything. That's just not so - there was a good piece on TV a couple of months ago about a local NO church and its congregants rebuilding, one house at a time. They were doing all the work themselves, as there was no aid actually reaching their area, despite promises. But that's very slow going, and most of the money came from the national church, not even the local one, which was a strapped for funds as its congregants. I think there's a lack of understanding about just what it means to be dirt-poor, and then to have literally everything you own be wiped out.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>I think there's a lack of understanding about just what it means to be dirt-poor, and then to have literally everything you own be wiped out.<< Precisely. Telling a poor American they are lazy or wondering why they just don't go out and make it happen, is no different than a multi-millionaire looking at a middle-class American and ridiculing them for not being rich. "Anyone can do it - it's so easy! Let me tell you the story of Bill Gates or J.K. Rowling! If they did it, you can too." Do middle-class Americans find that their circumstances and the lives that they lead present them with plenty of opportunities to suddenly become rich? Same concept.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer It's interesting that you injected race into the conversation, Dabob. I was referring to the City of New Orleans and the city leaders of New Orleans who are pointing at the slow trickle of federal money as the cause of their slow rebuilding progress. That wasn't the case in San Francisco in 1906. It was private money that rebuilt that city. It was people who had a sense of community and a sense that it was worth rebuilding the homes that they had built and earned. We've become too reliant on the federal government to solve our problems, both as individuals and as communities and states. And since we're putting our trust that Uncle Sam is going to be there for us, we aren't preparing for the inevitable as our ancestors were and we are slower at taking the bull by the horns when things go awry. I wasn't thinking about race. I was thinking about how dependent we've become. That wasn't the case a century ago.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <It's interesting that you injected race into the conversation, Dabob.> Actually, if you look at #38 and #43, I didn't say a thing about race. I did mention poverty, but not race. The ninth ward is predominantly black, but poor whites and Hispanics live there also; the common denominator is poverty, and nearly everyone there lives paycheck to paycheck. And while your point on dependence is well taken, I stand by my contention that people who are truly dirt-poor (of any race) who have literally everything they own wiped out overnight may not have bootstraps to pull up on. Some of the poorest have been working their tails off as I noted in #43 with the help of churches and other groups, which is great. But they're literally doing it one house at a time, and a neighborhood like that is not going to have a massive cash influx to do more than that if we're expecting it to come from its inhabitants alone. They simply don't have it.
