Charlotte Hays Loose Canon
Twisters
Let me get this straight: New Orleans' histrionic mayor flips out and fails to evacuate his poorer citizens, and George Bush is to blame. You'd almost think the press didn't like Mr. Bush....
Columnist Mark Steyn (the best Katrina commentator, for my money) has very much the same impression:
"I'll leave it to future generations of historians to settle the precise moment at which Hurricane Katrina finally completed its transformation into a Kansas-type twister, and swept up the massed ranks of the world's press to deposit them on the wilder shores of the Land of Oz. But for a couple of weeks now they've been there frolicking and gamboling as happy Media Munchkins, singing and dancing 'Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead.'
"Meanwhile, back in the real world, the storm is exhausted, meteorologically and politically. Power has been restored to the whole of Mississippi (much quicker than in Euro-style big-government Quebec during the 1998 ice storm, incidentally), the Big Easy is being pumped free of water far ahead of anybody's expectations, and, as the New York Times put it: 'Death Toll In New Orleans May Be Lower Than First Feared.'
"No truth in the rumor that early editions read 'Than First Hoped.'"
This is not to say that Bush's response was all that it might have been--and, indeed, Bush is taking responsibility (up to a point) for what did go wrong. Meanwhile, liberal columnist Michael Kinsley breaks ranks to admit that Bush is not single-handedly responsible for everything that has gone wrong since the world began:
"[Louisiana Senator Mary] Landrieu's I-told-you-so's [about federal money to strengthen the levees] would be more impressive if the press release archive on her Web site didn't contain equally urgent calls to spend billions of dollars to build boats the Navy hasn't asked for in Louisiana shipyards, self-congratulations for having planted a billion dollars of 'coastal impact assistance' for Louisiana in the energy bill (this is before the flood), and so on. Did she want flood control, or did she want $10 million to have 'America's largest river swamp' declared a 'National Heritage Area'?
"Obviously -- obviously in hindsight, that is -- we should have spent the money to strengthen the New Orleans levees. President Bill Clinton should have done it. Presidents George Bush Senior and Ronald Reagan should have done it. As Tim Noah notes in Slate, warnings about the perilous New Orleans levees go back at least to Fanny Trollope in 1832. In fact, the one president who is pretty much in the clear on this is our current Bush -- not because he did anything about the levees but because even if he had started something, it probably wouldn't have been finished yet."
(By the way, the part of Kinsley's column that has attracted the most attention: his revelation that CNN producers ask guests to "get angry" when discussing Katrina damage. Here is a good piece on that.)
How Not to Help Poor People
The visuals were the scenes at the Convention Center and the Superdome. But did they really reveal that white America (in particular Bush) doesn't care about black people?
I think they showed something else: the pernicious effect of federal assistance. In a way, you might say the problem is that we have loved poor African Americans to death.
"We still only have anecdotal evidence to go on, and we can be hopeful as the death toll remains far below the thousands originally predicted," writes Brendan Miniter of the Wall Street Journal. "But it's reasonable to surmise that Sen. Kennedy is correct about those who wanted to leave: Most people who could arrange for their own transportation got out of harm's way; those who depended on the government (and public transportation) were left for days to the mercy of armed thugs at the Superdome and Convention Center. It was an extreme example of what the welfare state has done to the poor for decades: use the promise of food, shelter and other necessities to lure most of the poor to a few central points and then leave them stranded and nearly helpless.
"This isn't a failure of President Bush's compassionate conservatism. Nor is it evidence that Ronald Reagan's philosophy of smaller government is fatally flawed. If LBJ had won his war on poverty, Ninth Ward residents would have had the means to drive themselves out of New Orleans. Instead, after decades and billions of tax dollars have been poured into big government programs, one out of four people in the Big Easy were still poor. That is an indictment of the welfare state and all its antipoverty programs."
The other thing the visuals laid bare was the breakdown of the family--you saw too many women and children alone, too many men who'd obviously pushed ahead of women to get on the buses to Houston.
George Will on the family factor:
"Liberalism's post-Katrina fearlessness in discovering the obvious -- if an inner city is inundated, the victims will be disproportionately minorities -- stopped short of indelicately noting how many of the victims were women with children but not husbands. Because it was released during the post-Katrina debacle, scant attention was paid to the National Center for Health Statistics' report that in 2003, 34.6 percent of all American births were to unmarried women. The percentage among African American women was 68.2.
"Given that most African Americans are middle class and almost half live outside central cities, and that 76 percent of all births to Louisiana African Americans were to unmarried women, it is a safe surmise that more than 80 percent of African American births in inner-city New Orleans -- as in some other inner cities -- were to women without husbands. That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males, and that translates into chaos in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine."
Rude Awakening?
Robert Funk, who founded the Jesus Seminar to make Jesus more palatable to those who can't believe the whole shebang, has died. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times contained this description of the seminar's work:
"Among the Jesus Seminar's assertions was that many of the miracles attributed to Jesus never occurred, at least in a literal sense. The Jesus Seminar concluded in 1995 that Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead. The scholars also agreed that there probably was no tomb and that Jesus' body probably was disposed of by his executioners, not his followers.
"But scholars -- who included Burton Mack, Marcus Borg, and John Dominic Crossan -- also concluded that the religious significance of Jesus' resurrection did not depend on historical fact."
St. Paul disagreed with Messrs. Mack, Borg, and Crossan--"And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain"--and I feel certain Dr. Funk knows better by now.
Buttresses
Good news for one group of Episcopalians who want to be orthodox without worshipping in the high school gym.
Katrina and 9/11: The Message Isn't What You Think
Loose Canon couldn't help noticing two interesting things about the stories commemorating the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. One is that many stories tended to focus on memories of personal sadness or trauma (victim stories) rather than on the attack. The other is that 9/11 was linked--understandably but wrongly--with Hurricane Katrina.
One story in the Washington Post managed to combine both themes, and it has the perfect headline to epitomize the victim approach to Sept. 11: "Enduring a Kinship of Loss." Gerry McCarty, who lost 70 friends in the World Trade Center, is helping in New Orleans. He and the other rescue workers in New Orleans sound like great guys--it's the reporter, Ceci Connolly, who covers them in the sob sister mode. The press can only see 9/11 as stories of "enduring loss," not as an attack to which we must respond.
More important, Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina are not the same sort of event. One was an act of war. One was an act of nature. I get sick and tired of hearing people refer to the "victims" of 9/11--they were casualties of war.
In a similar vein, Mark Steyn hates hearing 9/11 referred to as a "tragic event:"
"It wasn't a 'tragic event' or even one of a series of unfortunate events. It was an 'attack,' an 'act of war.' I sat at the lunch counter with a guy who'd tuned out the same station on the grounds that 'I never heard my grampa talk about 'the tragedy of Pearl Harbor.' But, consciously or otherwise, a serious effort was under way to transform the nature of the event, to soften it into a touchy-feely, huggy-weepy one-off. As I wrote last year: 'The president believes there's a war on. The Dems think 9/11 is like the 1998 ice storm or a Florida hurricane -- just one of those things.'
"I didn't know the half of it. If an act of war is like a hurricane -- freak of nature, get over it -- it's evidently no great leap to believe that a hurricane is an act of war. Katrina was thus 'allowed' to happen because Bush 'hates black people.' The Army Corps of Engineers was instructed to blow up New Orleans' 17th Street levee so that the flood would kill the poor people rather than destroy the valuable tourist real estate."
The other story that caught my eye was a poignant piece about Sgt. Isaac Ho'opii, a federal K-9 agent who heroically rescued people from the burning Pentagon. He is mourning the death of Vita, the dog who was with him that day and who later died.
I love animals and so I was moved by the story, despite its fitting well into the victim genre, until I came across this:
"Ho'opi'i comes to a standstill before a large black marble wall. This is the point of impact, exactly where the plane hit, and where today the names of 184 men, women, and children are engraved.
"Officially, the death toll on 9/11 was 189, but the Pentagon memorial excludes the five terrorists."
Let me get this straight: The Pentagon memorial "excludes" the five terrorists. How mean not to memorialize the monsters, who killed the 189. (Is the Post trying to position itself for a post jihad world? It recently had a piece on Muslim fashions for women.)
Here is what is missing from these sentimental pieces--a sense that an act of war is different from a hurricane. Of course there is one way a hurricane is similar to a terrorist attack: the devastation.
The "lesson" of Katrina is that when disaster strikes, it can't always be fixed in ten minutes. There will be a mayor who sits on his derriere, waiting for the cavalry, a hysterical governor, a bureaucrat who knows less than your ordinary CNN watchers, even a president who doesn't immediately grasp the situation. Something will go wrong.
And even if everything goes all right, it won't be a pretty picture. That is why we must win the war on terror. That is why we must transform the Middle East. That is why a failure in Iraq would be catastrophic.
We Drink at Funerals--and So Should You
Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose realizes that communities who take in people from New Orleans may not know what to make of them. In a moving piece, he describes the wonderful people of the region:
"We're a fiercely proud and independent people, and we don't cotton much to outside interference, but we're not ashamed to accept help when we need it. And right now, we need it.
"Just don't get carried away. For instance, once we get around to fishing again, don't try to tell us what kind of lures work best in your waters.
"We're not going to listen. We're stubborn that way.
"You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you'd probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard.
"We dance even if there's no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large and, frankly, we're suspicious of others who don't."
That just about says it.
There's No Place Like Home
Loose Canon knows that Barbara Bush was well-intended--she was trying to say, Welcome to Houston, but it came out: Let them Eat Cake ("What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.").
I agree that many people will benefit by getting out of New Orleans and building new lives in other places. But that leaves out one important part of the picture: Even if you are poor, especially if you are poor, you love your own belongings, your own house. Leaving home, even if it is a home in a poor section of New Orleans, has got to be a heartbreaker.
Ken Foster has the same reaction:
"I keep hearing people talk in almost celebratory tones of the 'New Orleans diaspora.' Please make note of this bit of ettiquette: Homeless, jobless people are not comforted by your predictions that their tragic circumstances will one day be considered historically significant and studied in text books by graduate students who will ponder the implications of their plight."
Many thanks to Amy Welborn for spotting this.
Better to Have Loved and Lost
One of the saddest stories in a day of sad stories is the death of five-week-old Susan Anne Catherine Torres, whose mother was kept on life support for three months so that her baby could be born. Baby Susan died of heart failure after surgery to repair a perforated intestine. During her brief life, she was loved. My heart goes out to the Torres family.
Does the Day Still Live in Infamy?
It is inevitable that this year the anniversary of Sept. 11 would be linked in the public consciousness with what happened more recently in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast.
Hurricane Katrina's toll of death and suffering is painful to witness, and Katrina will have a profound impact on the demographics of the nation in years to come. But the disasters said different things about America.
If you are in danger of forgetting what Sept. 11 revealed (and many are) and why we must prevail, Mark Halprin explains:
"For more than 20 years prior to September 11, Islamic terrorists imprisoned and murdered our diplomats and military personnel, destroyed our civil aviation, machine-gunned our civilians, razed our embassies, attacked an American warship and, in 1993, the U.S. itself. For varying reasons, none legitimate, we hesitated to mount an offensive against the terrorists' infrastructure, hunt them down, eliminate a single rogue regime that supported them, or properly disconcert our fatted allies whose robes they infested. This was comparable in its way to Munich. Only in 2001, when it became obvious to any rational being that we must, did we retaliate, but even then in the face of domestic pressure to judicialize the response, which was exactly what we had done all along." (Helprin is critical of the administration and the Department of Defense for not waging an all-out war, and I have to say that sometimes I do think we're playing games and holding back from the war we are militarily capable of fighting.)
Tech Central Station contributing editor Lee Harris, author of "Civilization and Its Enemies," seems to see in Katrina another turning point:
"In short, in the post-9/11 world, the federal government was looked upon as a bulwark that stands strong; in the post-Katrina world, it is seen as a levee that failed.
"That, however, is how history works; before we can understand the epoch we are living in, another bursts in upon us out of the blue. This happened with 9/11, and now again with Katrina. It is now anyone's guess where we go from here."
I am hoping that Katrina will force us to take a hard look at a number of things, including corruption and a culture of dependency. One of my not-so-gentle readers referred on the mini-boards to "Mrs. (sic) Hays' lack of compassion and disdain for people below the poverty level, which is evident in her 'Katrina Commission' remarks, makes me question how she can think of herself as Christian."
Disdain for people below the poverty level? For crying out loud. Nothing could be further from the truth. I certainly did not think that the poor people stranded in New Orleans "deserved it" or had "brought it upon themselves" or that it was okay to rescue them in a leisurely fashion. (I linked to Michael Novak who says that planning for the urban poor who are hampered in evacuating must be given more attention in disaster plans.)
What I said--and will say until I'm blue in the face--is that it was a culture of dependency that made so many people so--well--dependent. Let me repeat another link: George Newmayer's piece that explains how government programs have played a major role in renting the social fabric of New Orleans. I am in favor of finding a way to help people become a part of the mainstream. It would seem to me that this is preferable to creating a permanent underclass.
As everybody keeps saying, there is enough blame to go around. Columnist Charles Krauthammer does the best job on the blame game. He is critical of the president, who is not blameless. I'm not quoting that part, however, because you can feast on it by going to the entire column. I'm going to talk about something I know well from having been a reporter in New Orleans: the corrupt and incompetent local government.
Krauthammer quite rightly points the finger first at New Orleans' Trashy Mouthed Mayor Ray Nagin:
"1. The mayor of New Orleans. He knows the city. He knows the danger. He knows that during Hurricane Georges in 1998, the use of the Superdome was a disaster and fully two-thirds of residents never got out of the city. Nothing was done. He declared a mandatory evacuation only 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit. He did not even declare a voluntary evacuation until the day before that, at 5 p.m. At that time, he explained that he needed to study his legal authority to call a mandatory evacuation and was hesitating to do so lest the city be sued by hotels and other businesses."
And this:
"Mayor Ray Nagin has announced that, as bodies are still being found and as a public health catastrophe descends upon the city, he is sending 60 percent of his cops on city funds for a little R&R, mostly to Vegas hotels. Asked if it was appropriate to party in these circumstances, he responded: 'New Orleans is a party town. Get over it.'"
But Tommy Lipscomb points out that hizzoner doesn't just curse--he also cries. As if more flooding were needed... Auschwitz and Katrina
Loose Canon predicts that the isolated (from reality) left is going to overplay the hate Bush card. Former GOP presidential hopeful Gary Bauer is astonished at their vitriol:
"This morning, I braced myself and visited Democraticunderground.com, one of the most popular left-wing websites where thousands of activists share their feelings. Just as I expected, hatred and paranoia were in great supply. Believe it or not, the relief centers in Houston and other cities were being compared to concentration camps. One hyperventilating leftist said that when he watched the buses in New Orleans pick up survivors it reminded him 'of watching trains to Auschwitz being loaded.' No, I'm not making this up."
Just keep it up, guys.
Snowball: Only Halfway There
A message board is reporting that Snowball, the pet separated from the little boy who loved the dog, has been found:
"The Louisiana SPCA may have rescued 'Snowball,' the now-famous little dog that a crying boy was forced to leave behind.
"SPCA President Laura Maloney says they rescued a small, white terrier mix whom military officials told them they believed was Snowball, during evacuations Sunday from the Superdome.
"'He is very cute, but he's got a little attitude,' she reported of the terrier mix. [Note: Wouldn't you?]
"Of course, Maloney can't be sure of the dog's identity until the owner can be found--and it is possible that the military officials were wrong."
Finding Snowball is only half the battle--the egregious wrong won't be righted unless Snowball is reunited with his or her little boy. Annette Simmons is a grown-up but you only have to look at her with Princess, a 7-year-old shih tzu dog, to know how much a pet means when you're going through tough times.
When the Lunatics Take Over the Asylum...
In a special whither England issue of the New Criterion, Peter Mullen, a priest of the Church of England, says that one of England's most beloved institutions has become "like a psychotic kindergarten":
"As we prepare for our Harvest Festival Services, we see that what's left of the English Church is indistinguishable from a lunatic asylum. Everywhere you peer inside this once refined and educated, lovely and lovable national institution, there is only a mania for self-destruction. How else can you account for church services that compete with pantomime for dramatized idiocy? For example, I recently attended a conference for clergy at a beautiful medieval church in Oxford. It was supposed to be a choral Eucharist but there was no organ music--only some plinky-plonky stuff on an out-of-tune piano and mindless choruses in the Jesus Goes to Toytown fashion: interminable glum repetition of what was not worth singing once."
Dagger John and New Orleans
One of the best books ever written about an ethnic group in New York is Peter Quinn's splendid "Banished Children of Eve," which chronicles the hard times of Irish immigrants in the 1860s. The most vivid character is crusty "Dagger John" Hughes, New York's first Catholic archbishop. He was a very tough man and champion of the Irish. When anti-Catholic riots broke out in the country, Dagger John warned the mayor of New York that "if a single Catholic Church were burned in New York, the city would become a second Moscow." It was Dagger John who had the foresight to build St. Patrick's (with, it is said, the pennies of Irish maids) on Fifth Avenue. Loose Canon, mea culpa, always much preferred the architecture of the smaller St. Thomas's almost across the street, an Episcopal establishment (where one of my uncles began his career as a minister many years ago) to St. Pat's. But then I read Quinn's fine novel and now every time I pass St. Patrick's I see the indomitable old man on the scaffolding, cassock flapping in the wind, and I love St. Pat's.
This is a roundabout way of staying two things: You must read Peter Quinn's terrific book, and Dagger John, in his style of advocacy for the Irish, has important something to tell us about what went wrong in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Larry Elder made the connection for me:
"Disgusted by government 'charity,' Bishop John Joseph Hughes led movements to form non-government-aided Catholic schools and numerous self-help programs. He promoted abstinence and the belief that sex outside of marriage was a sin. His diocese's nuns served as an employment agency for Irish domestics and encouraged women to run boarding houses. What happened? Within two generations, 'the Irish proportion of arrests for violent crime had dropped to less than 10 percent from 60 percent. Irish children were entering ... the professions, politics, show business and commerce. In 1890, some 30 percent of the city's teachers were Irish women, and the Irish literacy rate exceeded 90 percent.'"
(Many thanks to Relapsed Catholic for spotting Elder's piece.)
It should be noted, as Victor Davis Hanson, LC's favorite living historian, does, that the social failure in New Orleans isn't limited to any one group--it's across the board:
"But besides topographical peril, New Orleans suffers from an ossified Louisianan political culture that has not evolved all that much from the crass demagoguery of Huey Long of the 1930s. The party machine's reason to be is providing exemptions for the very wealthy and subsidies for the dependent poor. We saw the dividends of this old 'every man a king' politics in the scapegoating by paralyzed public officials.
"The clueless mayor of New Orleans, who initially hesitated over federal requests to evacuate the entire city, was reduced to expletive-filled rants as hundreds of empty public buses sat idle. The teary governor of Louisiana whined mostly about the federal government. Meanwhile Sen. Mary Landrieu railed at the president: 'I might likely have to punch him -literally.'
"This sad trio proved how fortunate New York was to have a Rudy Giuliani on Sept. 11, or Los Angeles a Richard Riordan in time of earthquake."
(Quoting the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, Hanson also ascribes some of the bad stuff that went on in New Orleans to that old bugaboo human nature.)
Getting It Right This Time
Picking up Loose Canon's refrain that Katrina offers New Orleans a chance to get it right this time, David Brooks of the New York Times writes:
"The first rule of the rebuilding effort should be: Nothing Like Before. Most of the ambitious and organized people abandoned the inner-city areas of New Orleans long ago, leaving neighborhoods where roughly three-quarters of the people were poor.
"That's why the second rule of rebuilding should be: Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. The only chance we have to break the cycle of poverty is to integrate people who lack middle-class skills into neighborhoods with people who possess these skills and who insist on certain standards of behavior."
Like Dagger John did with his beloved Irish. Of course, it would be essential to see public officials change the way they spend public money, too.
O, Mighty Condom
Here's something else Dagger John knew: The best way to harm society and individuals is to tell them that they do not have the ability to abstain from sex outside of marriage. Sure, people, being human, fail (and some frequently), but it's a good ideal for a society that wants to prosper. The harm this philosophy wreaks in the U.S. is bad enough. But in developing societies like Uganda it is even worse.
In a piece entitled "Sacrificing Humans to the Condom Gods," on a Catholic pro-life site, there is this description of the situation in Uganda:
"Is it flippant to wonder if the major international AIDS institutions, the United Nations and its many allied nongovernmental organizations, actually worship the condom? After all, they are willing to make sacrifices - human sacrifices - in the name of the condom. Right now, these groups are in the process of sacrificing the people of Uganda.
"Uganda must be sacrificed because its AIDS rate is too low, and it is low because the government of Uganda decided almost from the beginning of the epidemic to seek to convince the general population to change its behaviors. School children were told to abstain and to delay sexual initiation. Married couples were told to remain faithful to one another. The school children listened; the couples listened, and Uganda escaped the epidemic that has devastated every other country in its region.
"But this success through a veritable sexual counter-revolution could never be acceptable to the liberal and sexually liberated members of the international AIDS establishment, who needed to prove that the new norms of sexual promiscuity were not to blame for the explosion of sexually transmitted diseases, culminating in the AIDS epidemic, and that sexual promiscuity could even be made 'safe' through a tiny piece of latex."
Dear Mrs. Sheehan
Remember Cindy Sheehan? Yeah, yeah, I know it's hard. But before she fades into the mists of the summer of '05, National Review Contributing Editor Mackubin Thomas Owens writes the letter President Bush should have sent her. It is a paraphrase of Abraham Lincoln's letter to Lydia Bixby, who lost two sons in the Civil War.
But, of course, there's a difference:
"Unlike Lincoln in the case of Mrs. Bixby, President Bush knows that Mrs. Sheehan sympathizes with her son's killers. She has expressed her sympathies publicly on more than one occasion. But the president should send such a letter anyway. Maybe it could shame Cindy Sheehan into separating her political agenda from her son's honorable sacrifice and enable her to grant Casey Sheehan the dignity and respect that his sacrifice deserves."
The Katrina Kommission
As I've mentioned, I love New Orleans, a city that seemed to exist primarily to remind us that life is a gift to be savored. Nowhere in America is the Protestant work ethic more in abeyance than in New Orleans. But sometimes the city that care forgot carries her philosophy too far.
What we saw on our TVs last week was a public display of what's always just beneath the surface in New Orleans: violence, carelessness, passivity, and incompetence. Why do I leave out poverty? Because it is the likely end product of the four qualities I did mention.
Oddly enough, the very qualities I noted arise not just from the city's long history of living for the minute, but from more modern policies of teaching the poor, who bore the brunt of the hurricane's destruction, to live for the minute. The city was, as George Neumayr of the American Spectator puts it, "a sewer of applied liberalism" that was "lawless long before [last] week."
Newmayer writes:
"New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country. By mid-August of this year, 192 murders had been committed in New Orleans, "nearly 10 times the national average," reported the Associated Press. Gunfire is so common in New Orleans -- and criminals so fierce -- that when university researchers conducted an experiment last year in which they had cops fire 700 blank rounds in a neighborhood on a random afternoon 'no one called to report the gunfire,' reported AP. New Orleans was ripe for collapse.
"Like riotous Los Angeles since the 1960s, New Orleans has been a wasteland of politically correct dysfunction for decades -- public schools so obviously decimated vouchers were proposed this year (and torpedoed by the left), barbaric gangster rap culture no one will confront lest they offend liberal pieties, multiculturalist frauds who empower no one but themselves, and cops neutered by the NAACP and ACLU.
"Criminals have ruled New Orleans for some time, convincing many members of the middle class, long before the hurricane, that the city was unlivable. In 1994, New Orleans was the murder capital of America. It had 421 murders that year. Criminologists predicted 300 murders this year, a projection that now looks quite conservative.
"Criminals dominate their neighborhoods to the point that people don't even call in crimes. The district attorney's office, tacitly admitting that the city's law-abiding citizens live in fear, has taken the 'unusual' step of establishing a local witness protection program to encourage the reporting of crime, reports AP.
"According to the New Orleans Police Foundation, most murderers get off -- only 1 in 4 are convicted -- and 42 percent of cases involving serious crimes since 2002 have been dropped by prosecutors."
One of my best friends in New Orleans was an indigent defender at Tulane and Broad, the criminal court building that would be the mouth of hell if it weren't filled with so many Damon Runyonesque characters. She was once pummeled to within an inch of her life by a client she'd just gotten off. Did this make her worry about others he might pummel in the future? Not a bit. She was a committed leftist. I always thought that getting people who were possibly not entirely innocent of murder and mayhem off was only half the fun for her--the other half was socking it to capitalist society.
The good people of Baton Rouge have been compassionate to those fleeing New Orleans, but you can't blame them for stocking up on more than butter.
By the way, I'm all for finding out what went wrong in New Orleans, but I agree with Michelle Malkin's plaintive "Not Another Damned Commission" post. (You'll have to scroll down past the fine work Michelle is doing on Air America.)
The Democrats see a commission not as quiet probing but as a rerun of the Superdome/Convention Center scenes on TV, with people shouting that they hate George Bush. (The New Orleans poor would be filling in for the politically motivated World Trade Center widows who appeared before the 9/11 Commission.)
But be careful what you wish for: A genuine search for went wrong might actually turn up egregious failures on the state and local level. Dick Morris admits the feds made mistakes but thinks that Bush will end up doing well with hurricane relief.
I'd Rather Be a Refugee
Good heavens. Must we decide that the fine old word refugee is pejorative? It isn't. Here's Refdesk's definition: "One who flees in search of refuge, as in times of war, political oppression, or religious persecution."
Or hurricanes. Like John Derbyshire of National Review's The Corner, I'd rather be called a refugee than an evacuee:
"A refugee has taken matters into his own hands, got up and left, to seek better conditions elsewhere.
"An evacuee has sat around in a state of passive dependency, waiting for the authorities to decide his fate."
Are Good Men Harder to Find in New Orleans?
Of course, many people in New Orleans were helpless. Writing in the National Review, theologian Michael Novak points to the demographics:
"If you add together the 26,000 female householders with children under 18, no husband present, and the 18,000 householders more than 65 years old and living alone, that is an estimated 40,000 female-headed households. That explains the pictures we are seeing on television, which are overwhelmingly females, most often with young children. The chances of persons in this demographic being employed full-time, year-round, and with a good income, are not high. The chances of them living in poverty, and without an automobile, are exceedingly high.
"In the future, city planners should carefully count in advance the numbers of persons who fall in this demographic when they formulate evacuation plans. Female householders all by themselves with children or over 65 are statistically likely to be severely disadvantaged in thinking about options for the future, disadvantaged in not having the means to determine their own destiny, and disadvantaged with respect to the habits of mind that accustom them to taking charge of their own future. Special provision will need to be made for helping them. They are likely to be accustomed to being taken care of by the state.
"The younger mothers among them have been abandoned by those they should have been able to count on, the males in their lives. The over-65s (in urban areas) are likely to be totally dependent on Social Security and other government benefits, without private pensions or homeownership of their own. In emergencies, such persons need someone else to take care of them. It is wrong to throw them, at this point, solely on their own resources. Some will be able to manage that, but by no means all."
A friend of mine saw an indication of something really, really bad on the TV: In shots of the refugees arriving in Houston, big strapping men seemed to have gotten there first. Have we reached the point of degradation that we as a society are no longer willing to say, Women and Children First?
Well, You Couldn't Call Him a Relativist
Just came across a good piece on the possessor of one of the most brilliant minds in Christendom, the gruff Louis Bouyer, the French theologian who died last year. He started out as a Prot but:
"Bouyer then converted to Catholicism in 1939. He then redid his studies at Paris' Institut Catholique. He was a remarkable student: during his time at the Institut, he complete a thesis on Athanasius ... that he published in 1943 and a five-hundred page account of ... The Pascal Mystery, which was to become a classic reference of the Jewish origins of the Eucharistic liturgy. A few years later, in 1954, Bouyer published a book-length reflection on Protestantism. His conclusion: the best Protestant doctrines were either incomplete or poorly understood Catholic ones."
A World Treasure
Although New Orleans is a deeply flawed city, she nevertheless has long been one of the loveliest spots on the planet. An old pal from my misspent youth in the French Quarter, Jack Davis, now publisher of the (Hartford) Courant, explains why the world would be a poorer place without New Orleans in a piece headlined "A World Treasure":
Of course it has to be rebuilt. And protected.New Orleans was at its best on the eve of destruction. It was at a peak of wonderfulness and livability, having worked resourcefully for four decades to make itself America's most interesting city, even though it had no economic or geographic need to exist. It was a weird and creative and generally friendly world of its own, and not the worst place in America to be poor. ...
They are not self-indulgent or improvident, as they have been called this past week. They are collectively ingenious. In these last creative decades, they took a city that was already a world cultural treasure, and improved it for the world to visit and enjoy and study. The world now needs to come to the rescue, as it came to the rescue of Florence and Venice when they were ruinously flooded in 1966. They were restored even without guarantees that the waters would never return.
There may be money to rebuild New Orleans without breaking the American taxpayer--Qatar, for example, has pledged $100 million. Maybe this will be a chance for New Orleans to rebound. There are a number of things New Orleans should try to get right this go around, including a better public school system so that her citizens aren't so dependent on service industry jobs. (Hugh Hewitt is also suggesting group-to-group help in restoring the city.)
Rosebud
The above celebration of New Orleans isn't meant to suggest that New Orleanians in charge acquitted themselves well last week. Asked on Nightline what he might have done differently, dirty-mouthed New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said that he would have begun cursing out the higher ups earlier. Mayor Nagin, you were the higher up.
While the mainstream media floods the zone with criticism of President Bush (Wes Pruden's piece on the "venomous vultures of the left" is a must-read), it is Nagin who ultimately emerges as the anti-Giuliani.
Columnist Mark Steyn-who dubbed Nagin Mayor Culpa-was great on the hapless city and her lousy leadership: "For some reason, I failed to consider the possibility that the panickers would include Hizzoner the Mayor and the looters would include significant numbers of the police department, though in fairness I wasn't the only one. As General Blum said at Saturday's Defence Department briefing: `No one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans.'
"Indeed, they eroded faster than the levees. Several hundred cops are reported to have walked off the job. To give the city credit, it has a lovely `Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan' for hurricanes. The only flaw in the plan is that the person charged with putting it into effect is the mayor. And he didn't.
"But I don't want to blame any single figure: the anti-Bush crowd have that act pretty much sewn up. I'd say New Orleans's political failure is symptomatic of a broader failure.
"I got an e-mail over the weekend from a US Army surgeon just back in Afghanistan after his wedding. Changing planes in Kuwait for the final leg to Bagram and confronted by yet another charity box for Katrina relief, he decided that this time he'd pass. `I'd had it up to here,' he wrote, `with the passivity, the whining, and the when-are-they-going-to-do-something blame game.'"
For me nothing made the stupidity of the situation hit home harder than the story of the little boy who wasn't allowed to take his pet with him on the bus to Houston. I've mentioned him before, but let me quote some this time:
"At the back end of the line, people jammed against police barricades in the rain. Refugees passed out and had to be lifted hand-over-hand overhead to medics. Pets were not allowed on the bus, and when a police officer confiscated a little boy's dog, the child cried until he vomited. `Snowball, snowball,' he cried."
This was so wrong. A dog in the arms of a boy who's lost much if not everything is a civilizing influence. Pets are put on earth to teach us how to love, and Snowball had obviously done his or her job well. Why didn't the police officer say, "Get on quick with your dog, son?"
Speaking of Snowball, I've gone back and forth about whether to bring up the plight of animals when there is so much human need. But if you want to help the legions of Snowballs stranded in New Orleans, The Humane Society of the United States is accepting donations. (And, belatedly, the authorities seem to be letting people take their pets.)
Lies We Tell Poor People
One of the things that the left is saying in the aftermath of Katrina is that we must embark on a national conversation about race and poverty. I couldn't agree more.
I only hope Elizabeth Kantor, who had this to say about New Orleans, will be invited to speak:
"There are times and places when there is simply no substitute for the decent, competent behavior that people learn by being responsible for themselves and their own families, and that they tend to lose when they think of their own basic needs as somebody else's problem. There are situations in which the habits bred by dependency can mean people die who otherwise would live.
"One of those situations is when you're in a crowd of desperate, hungry, and dehydrated people waiting for a helicopter to land with food and water.
"Our underclass has been told a lot of lies:
"You're poor because other people are rich; they owe you
"Sleeping with a woman doesn't oblige you to assume the responsibilities of a husband and a father
"The government will always take care of you.
Here's to You, Mr. Robinson
Even the Donner Party waited more than four days: "It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive," Randall Robinson of Transafrica wrote. He has since retracted the el bizarro statement, but Jonah Goldberg says Robinson should apologize. And that's not all Jonah says:
"There's an old axiom which says that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. But Robinson was so keen on believing this allegation he went straight to the megaphone after someone simply told him it was so. What kind of person takes such news at face value? Let's see: Racists surely would. But that's a bit of a stretch. Idiots would take it at face value. But I don't think Robinson is anybody's fool. I've got it: He's a fraud. Yeah, that works. It's not perfect, but it will do the job."
Justice Rehnquist, R.I.P.
"When someone like Judge John Roberts tears up at the mere mention of another man's passing, one knows that a great man has died," Manuel Miranda writes in a moving tribute to Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, who died Sunday.
"When Ronald Reagan elevated Rehnquist in 1986 to be the 16th chief justice, he had every reason to expect a fight. Reagan knew the deep judicial record that Rehnquist had built. He was, for example, one of only two justices (with Kennedy appointee Byron White) who had dissented in Roe v. Wade. But Reagan was committed to principles of limited government, so he didn't shy away from conflict. Indeed, Democrats tried to sink Rehnquist, and he was confirmed 65-33, a closer vote than 13 years earlier--even though Republicans had a Senate majority in 1986.
"The controversy was well worth it. As he chooses his second Supreme Court nominee, President Bush would be well advised to remember his predecessors' finer achievement represented in William Rehnquist, when those presidents kept promises and did not shy from a fight.
A Perfect Storm
No, my not-so-gentle readers, I have no sympathy whatsoever for the thugs who are looting New Orleans. Not an ounce. I am saving my sympathy for people who deserve it, like the little boy in this story. He will break your heart. I am saving it for the very sick people at Charity Hospital who, on top of everything else, must be evacuated in helicopters, a process delayed by shots fired by looters. Like everybody else in America, I am worried about the thousands of desperate people stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center without food, water, or medical supplies. Let's hope that they soon are out of there. And, while we're at it, let's hope that the child in this picture has been carried to safety.
But the looters? Mona Charen is right about what should be done to them. Meanwhile, if you want to help, here is a list of charities working with victims of the hurricane.
I just talked to a friend who got out of New Orleans--somebody knocked on her door and said she had ten minutes. She was going to argue but the rescuer said that the levee had broken. "This is about civilization," he said and she realized how bad it was. My friend still sounds stunned by the utter pandemonium: You don't know anything about your friends two or three blocks away. (We're hoping that another friend, who rode out the last hurricane in his house with his dogs, is alive.) I asked her why it was taking so long to get supplies to the people trapped in the Convention Center. She said she didn't know but that there is probably a good reason--we don't really know yet, even though the Blame Bush movement is not waiting for facts on the ground. As for the National Guard, their problem, according to my friend, is not that some are in Iraq but that there is no staging area for them to enter New Orleans. The magnitude of the disaster is hard to grasp.
My evacuee friend's main concern is for Bush's safety when he goes to New Orleans, a visit that must be staged in an attempt to mollify the media but will have no meaning for the suffering people of New Orleans. In all probability, few will know he is there, given the breakdown in communications.
There is too much concentration, my friend added, on image: "Louisiana's Gov. Kathleen Blanco was shakier, but she can recover," opined the usually astute Peggy Noonan. When you've been through what New Orleans has been through, such Sunday morning talk show chatter is meaningless. Kathleen Blanco has won my friend's admiration.
Conservative activist Gary Bauer is also puzzled by the sick phenomenon of thinking of a disaster of epic proportions mainly as a stick with which to beat Bush. In a Sept. 1 email, he wrote:
"While some are trying to lay the blame for Hurricane Katrina at President Bush's feet, this president has been busy leading what is very likely the largest disaster relief effort in this nation's history. It is almost unparalleled in its scope, short of a national mobilization for war. In fact, some are calling it the 'second Battle of New Orleans,' referring to the War of 1812, and the comparison isn't far off."
Bauer has a list of what is being done, including the deployment of 30,000 National Guard, and praise for the allies who have stepped up to the plate with offers of aid for the stricken area: "To all these folks we say, 'Thank You!'"
What, Besides the Levees, Broke?
As I've mentioned, I lived in New Orleans for more than a decade, and I love the city (I'm not ready to listen to people like my brother-in-law, who insists that New Orleans will become another Pompeii).
But New Orleans isn't perfect, and Thomas Lifson of the American Thinker has been thinking about some of the faults exposed by the hurricane:
"The incomplete evacuation of citizens and warehousing in the Superdome struck me at the time as a poor choice. Why were there not sound trucks cruising the streets warning those detached from the media to run for their lives? Why weren't there places designated where folks heading out of town could fill up their cars with refugees lacking transportation? Why wasn't every bus, truck, and railroad freight car pressed into service to haul people away?"
And getting to the heart of the matter:
"Many years ago, an oilman in Houston pointed out to me that there was no inherent reason Houston should have emerged as the world capital of the petroleum business. New Orleans was already a major city with centuries of history, proximity to oil deposits, and huge transportation advantages when the Houston Ship Channel was dredged, making the then-small city of Houston into a major port. The discovery of the Humble oil field certainly helped Houston rise as an oil center, but the industry could just as easily have centered itself in New Orleans.
"When I pressed my oilman informant for the reason Houston prevailed, he gave me a look of pity for my naiveté, and said, 'Corruption.' Anyone making a fortune in New Orleans based on access to any kind of public resources would find himself coping with all sorts of hands extended for palm-greasing. Permits, taxes, fees, and outright bribes would be a never-ending nightmare. Houston, in contrast, was interested in growth, jobs, prosperity, and extending a welcoming hand to newcomers. New Orleans might be a great place to spend a pleasant weekend, but Houston is the place to build a business.
"Today, metropolitan Houston houses roughly 4 times the population of pre-Katrina metropolitan New Orleans, despite the considerable advantage New Orleans has of capturing the shipping traffic of the Mississippi basin."
Maybe this dreadful hurricane offers the city a new start.
Common Ground
Beliefnet member Black Catholic is one of Loose Canon's harsher critics on the miniboard. So I hope I won't ruin his or her day by reprinting two recent BC posts about which I can only say, "I couldn't agree more, BC."
BC is from New Orleans and has these insightful comments on the scenes of looting we're all seeing on TV: "My mother played for too many funerals at St. Jude's and St. Augustine's. Welcome to the ghetto, LC. Welcome to where I'm from. Think about running inside EVERY night, to avoid the numbskulls. Think about hiding your possessions from people who'd steal air if they could. Today, what is on TV is what has always been there. The poor abandoned, the gangbangers owning the night. You just don't get to see it on TV usually." And this:
"My mother made contact early this morning. She, and others, believe the violent criminals are druggies who have not had a fix since Sunday, and gangbangers, given where the violence is. The Gangsters are used to rolling at will through Carrollton. Troops will put and end to that. Can we keep them?
"The true irony is that we are using American tax dollars to rebuild Iraq, and begging private funds to fix New Orleans. Shouldn't be the other way around? Isn't this immoral?"
Of course, we don't agree about Iraq, but I am glad that you heard from your mother--and that you seem to agree with me that civil order would be helpful to people who live in projects.
Tolerance of crime hurts the poor most.
Can You Eat a TV Set?
After Sept. 11, people behaved in a way that made us proud. But in New Orleans the authorities are forced to wage what Drudge calls "The Battle for New Orleans." As the Associated Press story on Drudge describes the scene:
"Managers at the Covenant Home nursing center were prepared to cope with power outages and supply shortages following Hurricane Katrina. They weren't ready for looters.
"The nursing home lost its bus after the driver surrendered it to carjackers. Groups of people then drove by the center, shouting to residents, 'Get out!'
"On Wednesday, 80 residents, most of them in wheelchairs, were evacuated to other nursing homes in the state.
"'We had excellent plans. We had enough food for 10 days,' said Peggy Hoffman, the home's executive director. 'Now we'll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot.'
"Looters around New Orleans spent another day Wednesday threatening survivors and ransacking stores. Some were desperate for food--others just wanted beer and TVs."
Taking goods to survive is one thing--and the AP story includes people who appear to be decent people but who are forced to do just that:
"Some outside the same Rite-Aid on Thursday were anxious to show they needed what they were taking. A gray-haired man who would not give his name pulled up his T-shirt to show a surgery scar and explained that he needs pads for incontinence.
"'I'm a Christian. I feel bad going in there,' he said.
He sounds like an admirable man. I also heard about people stealing a car to escape, which is understandable (as long as it didn't cause the car's owner to perish). These are not the kinds of acts I am talking about when I condemn looters. I am talking about the thugs who threaten survivors and engage in violence. Unfortunately, our liberal elites refuse to condemn this behavior.
One of the most outrageous examples of excusing lawlessness comes in today's Washington Post:
"But, as we are also learning from the post-Katrina chaos, what we think of as looting may be more complicated than it seems.
"Benigno E. Aguirre of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware has been watching and reading about looters in Louisiana. 'It may look from the outside as if they are stealing or breaking the law,' says Aguirre, 'when in fact some of them are trying to survive.'
"On the other hand, he says, some of the thieves are garden-variety crooks. 'There is always a very small number of people that are predisposed to crime, and they see a disaster as an opportunity to act.'
"There are the disenfranchised who jump at the chance to get even with those who have more stuff than they do. 'Disasters can become opportunity for class warfare, and that kind of appropriation of other people's property should be prosecuted,' he says.
What is this? A class warfare theory of natural disasters? Prof. Aguirre calls them the disenfranchised. I call them looters. Outlaws. And I tremble for the future of a society that refuses to condemn such lawlessness in the harshest of terms.
Many people in New Orleans are dispossessed at this point. But looting is wrong no matter what your financial situation. And the looters, in making the whole town more dangerous and preventing rescues, are most of all harming the law-abiding dispossessed.
(Lucianne's summation of the story just quoted: "The moral nuances of stealing something you can't, eat, drink, watch or sell. Do flat-screens float?")
A Beliefnet member thinks I am not sufficiently pro-looter: "All I can say is thank the Lord you had no family members involved in this unfortunate incident. You are extremely hypocritical but I wonder how you would view the 'looters' if you yourself were without food, water, clean place to rest and hope for rescue. I find it DISGUSTING that someone like you would actually sit and judge those less fortunate. I would never wish any negativity onto anyone but perhaps a little dose of KARMA might serve you and your pathetic words better. You are EVIL."
Evil or not, I lived in New Orleans for more than ten years. I have numerous friends, two godchildren and a cousin who live there. Some are accounted for and some aren't. I hope and pray that they all have survived Katrina and that those who didn't get out in time will also be safe in a New Orleans dominated by murderous thugs. I take it you are willing to make excuses for somebody who risks the lives of others by taking the bus of a nursing home?
One of the more dramatic stories I heard from a friend concerns a television station employee who was attacked by looters as he tried to drive away from the city-there was a lot of camera equipment in his car. He was forced to run over one of the looters. I hope he doesn't lose any sleep over this justified act of self-defense.
Riding Your Hobbyhorse into the Hurricane
Sure, liberals refuse to blame looters for looting. But that doesn't mean they aren't blamers. Not at all. They have two blamees for Katrina: Not surprisingly, they are blaming George Bush and global warming.
My colleague Charlotte Allen has a terrific piece blaming Bush ("A Levee-Bursting Torrent of Bush-Bashing"), and James K. Glassman--my editor when we both worked on an alternative weekly in New Orleans--has an excellent piece on blaming global warming (it begins with the particularly welcome news that his daughter-- who happens to be my beautiful godchild--and her family got out safely):
"[T]he response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.
"Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.
"Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.
"But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: 'Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East--and now Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.'"
Angels
It's impossible to underestimate the needs of those hit by Katrina--and despite what I wrote above, there are angels out there helping them. I don't know a soul in my hometown in Mississippi who's not involved in helping the refugees. Beliefnet has provided a list of charities, and a number of blogs, including Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt, have lists. I like the Salvation Army.
Sympathy for Looters
Amid the breakdown of civil order in New Orleans, there is looting. Nothing is more despicable or indicative of how tenuous the bonds that hold society together are. How did NBC's Brian Williams characterize these outlaws last night on the news?
He portrayed them as being "frustrated," adding,
"Later, in the downtown area, we also saw what can happen when people have nothing. Looting was everywhere and it was flagrant."
Not what happens "when people have nothing," but what happens when lawless people take over the town. A lot of people in New Orleans now "have nothing," and I daresay everybody is "frustrated." But only outlaws, usually held more (but probably not entirely) in check by the police and other manifestations of civic order, are looting.
Regarding these villains as "frustrated people" who "have nothing" is liberal non-judgmentalism carried to absurdity. Of course, they are bad people. You know this instinctively (that may be why Williams warned that the scenes of looting were disturbing and you might want to glance away from your TV).
This sympathy for these devils--and they are devils--doesn't improve the situation, and it is infuriating when you think of all the decent people being victimized. Maybe Mr. Williams would be judgmental if he knew these poor, frustrated souls are focusing more on guns than blankies? (Hugh Hewitt thinks that looting scenes should not be shown because they only add to the disorder-I don't know.)
For a vivid account by somebody who has lost his family business, a New Orleans restaurant, to Katrina, here's Raymond Arroyo of EWTN:
"At any moment in New Orleans, these things can happen. But you never imagine they'll look like this when they do and to many people watching these are rooftops, these are chimneytops and people on them. But to us these are icons of our childhood, this is our music, our culture, our life, and it's awful watching it in this state.
"And I can't imagine, people are saying weeks, a few weeks. I can't imagine. The reports I'm getting and I've spoken to a few people who have just been there or who are on their way out. In Jefferson Parish, right next to Orleans where we live, in Metairie, there are floating bodies, there are snakes, there are alligators, gas leaks, and this is sitting and it is going to sit for several weeks."
Mr. Arroyo, to my knowledge, is not looting. I hope that what's left of his damaged belongings will be safe from "frustrated" people.
An Episcopal bishop paints a grim picture of New Orleans and the surrounding area, noting there's lots more important than property damage:
"Bishop Jenkins said that of the 18 parishes in the city of New Orleans, all but 'Christ Church Cathedral and perhaps those on the St. Charles Ridge' he expected would be under water. 'Cholera, Yellow Fever, West Nile virus' and other water-borne diseases pose a threat now, Bishop Jenkins said.
"Christ Church, Slidell, and St. Michael's, Mandeville, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in St. Tammany Parish, and St. Mary's, Chalmette, east of the city in St. Bernard Parish, are in areas also reported hard hit by the flooding. Power and telephone service across Southern Louisiana is out and the situation in rural parishes outside the city is unclear. But 'now is not the time to worry about property,' Bishop Jenkins said, 'but to pray to God and to pray for those in need.'
Churches are helping in word and deed. Lutherans are recruiting retired firemen and military people to help rescue people, and Pope Benedict and other religious leaders are offering prayers. I like the Salvation Army, and Beliefnet has a list of charities that are helping Katrina victims. Instapundit quotes an assessment that the Mennonites are efficient. Not surprising.
Watch out for hurricane-relief scam artists. We want to make sure that they are "frustrated" and that the aid gets to people who need it.
Back to Everyday Life
Michelle Malkin reports that there are frustrated people in her neighborhood in normal times.
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