The world is a vampire

The coverage of New Orleans is just killing me. Sapping away at my defenses. It's so up and down. The best of humanity, and the very, very worst.

I heard a story on NPR this morning about a 20 year old guy who commandeered a school bus and drove a bunch of people he picked up along the way to Houston. They're at the Astrodome. Good for him. Give him a well-paying job- he shows initiative and spirit under very bad circumstances. I'm impressed.

The looters who are menacing not only the Walmarts in the area have hit the hospitals. Fuck them. Start shooting those fuckers. They have no excuse to live. It's one thing to steal food. I would do that under the circumstances. It's another to steal from a hospital that is trying to care for people in far worse shape than yourself. Looks like greed on the prowl to me. And I heard a man on tv justifying it by saying that they were "opressed" to begin with. That makes me very angry. There is no excuse for acting like a predatory beast. None. Leave the hospitals and the doctors alone, chump- they would take care of your sorry ass if you were in need.

And then there's the ineptitude of the response in general. I don't think it's hard to imagine how quickly social structure breaks down when the basic necessities of life are taken away. Without food, water, sanitation and general personal comfort, people are going to get crazy. I'm thinking of the problems faced at the Convention Center and the stadium. Put that many people in those places, and it's going to be rough going if the logistics aren't fully thought out in advance. That appears to be what happened here. I just can't fathom why there wasn't a better response. I would imagine that a city of that size and topography would have a very well-developed disaster relief team. It would make sense, no? Evidently not.

And what about the people who are stuck there? They seem to be majority poor. The sick, old and infirm, I can understand. The poor, I can also understand. Without your own vehicle, there doesn't seem to have been much of an alternative to staying. So why weren't planners on top of this? I would think that disaster professionals in New Orleans would know the demographics they were dealing with. I don't think that they're seeing residents of the Garden District in the Convention Center right now. I hope to God that they don't find out in later years that the response was poorly planned because no one cared about the poor people. I hope it's just human incompetence rather than corruption.