Where's the Anarchy in Cedar Rapids?
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has seen tremendous flooding recently. A reader writes about this, and compares it to another recently flooded city on the Mississippi River.
Hi Dennis -- It has been a while since I have written, but I follow your blog closely and hope you're doing well! The blog is as good as ever, in my opinion!(The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Mangan's.)
I write because I grew up in Iowa, lived in Cedar Rapids for a while, and cannot help but notice the differences in flood preparation and response between Iowa and New Orleans....and because you might be one of the few people who care about my observations! Anyway, here is what I see in Iowa and what is making the response to the flooding there so efficient, and how it is 180 degrees different than the disaster in NOLA:
Iowa: Cooperative and can do spirit and pride and compassion for the fellow citizen
New Orleans: fighting with and blaming of police and all authorities
Iowa: A sense of humor and optimism
New Orleans: bitching and hostility and insistence that government and the Corps of Engineers are out to get them
Iowa: Trust and willingness to follow orders from police and civil defense authorities -- this includes everything from evacuating homes to cutting back on water use. The authorities' urgings to reduce household water use have been so successful that Cedar Rapids will have more water services available, and sooner, than they had hoped. This trust and willingness has contributed to ZERO FATALITIES from the floods.
New Orleans: stupidity, inaction, lack of preparedness
Iowa: Willingness to work hard for nothing (eg, sandbagging, a job that can be struck from the list of "jobs that Americans won't do")
New Orleans: not much willingness to do much of anything to help except point fingers
Iowa : ZERO looting
New Orleans: looting galore
Iowa: organization, well organized news conferences, people following orders
New Orleans: chaos, finger-pointing, racial tensions, blacks and racist media thugs daring to point their fingers at whites and an "evil" government
Iowa: well run, orderly, well prepared shelters even though they are not really set up to house flood victims
New Orleans: chaos, unprepared shelters, Superdome a living hell for whites (ie, racism), even though New Orleans has a well publicized and well known Gulf hurricane threat every year
I could go on, but the preparedness and capability and cooperation and functionality and success of white Iowa stand in sharp contrast to Mayor Nagin's dysfunctional chocolate city.
If this is of interest, post to MM, but please scrub my name as of course I have a day job and all of these observations are of course not permitted in polite company!
Labels: Corruption
posted by Dennis Mangan @ 6:55 AM
14 comments
14 Comments:
Iowa: white
New Orleans: black
And a looter was caught robbing a home in Iowa and was stopped by neighbors. Guess the race...
And a looter was caught robbing a home in Iowa and was stopped by neighbors. Guess the race...
Oh, let me, let me. Was he Chinese?
Oh, let me, let me. Was he Chinese?
Close. She was Thai.
You forgot to mention something.
Shooting at rescue helicopters.
No, not in Iowa.
Here they are: White looters in Iowa!
The authorities had to find someone to carry the can!
Here are some more looters!
Oh, we aren't in Iowa anymore Toto!
"Anonymous said...
Here they are: White looters in Iowa!
The authorities had to find someone to carry the can!"
http://www.wowt.com/home/headlines/19427404.html
It's so sad that Mel Brooks has been reduced to looting.
It's obvious why the difference between New Orleans and Iowa. George Bush doesn't hate white people.
Honestly, I've had otherwise sensible people (white people by the way - liberal 20 somethings) tell me that the shameful spectacle in New Orleans was due to George Bush hating, or at least not caring about, black people. As if he had stood on the steps of the Capitol all got up in an Imperial Kleagle's robes when he took his oath of office. George Bush can be faulted (even damned) for many things, but I don't think that racial animus is one of them.
It goes to show the childishness of many people in having such high regard for the government - as if government could stem the winds, hold back the waves, and make irresponsible people act responsibly. In short - make black ghetto dwellers act like Iowans.
Anyone would be a fool to rely on the government to bail them out in a disaster - and twice the fool to rely on a black run government.
What is the likelihood of the surging Mississippi waters carrying all the way to the Gulf of Mexico (and thus passing through New Orleans)? How naked an example of HBD would that be?
What is the likelihood of the surging Mississippi waters carrying all the way to the Gulf of Mexico (and thus passing through New Orleans)? How naked an example of HBD would that be?
Yes, I was thinking that on the way home today ... it will be interesting.
If I remember correctly from 1993 (just checked on Wikipedia), the Ohio river contributes so much more water to the Mississippi than the Missouri and upper Mississippi that there weren't major floods on the lower Mississippi.
Amit
In some sense, the response of any population to a natural disaster is going to depend on the ratio of users to contributors ... or perhaps the ratio of those who feel they are entitled to those who want to contribute.
It would be interesting to see what other climate weirdness happened in '93, but with recent news that the atmospheric concentration of H2O going down, it would seem that we are in for a colder future ... which might wreck a whole lot of people's sense of entitlement.
It would be interesting to see what other climate weirdness happened in '93, but with recent news that the atmospheric concentration of H2O going down, it would seem that we are in for a colder future ... which might wreck a whole lot of people's sense of entitlement.
Dude, you are so wright ... I remember someone confidently predicting a large increase in certain minority populations based on US Census data, but what the folks at the Census don't tell you about their predictions is that they assumed the current climate conditions (which are pretty much optimal for certain groups).
Should we return to cooler conditions, we might see a contraction in certain populations and perhaps an explosion in the brains of the doom and gloom brigade.
However, I wish I could have thought of these things before now.
One of my Iowa cousins: "I used to say I am Scotch and Luxemburger, but nobody knows what Luxemburger is, so now I say I'm Scotch and Soda". Atta girl.
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