When a disaster such as Katrina occurs, the first thing some people think to do is to place the blame.
When a disaster such as Katrina occurs, the first thing some people think to do is to place the blame. Because it was New Orleans that took the biggest hit, it figures that some people see it as God’s vengeance for the city’s libertine ways. Likening the Big Easy to Sodom and Gomorrah gives them the satisfaction of finding a reason behind such an unreasonable event.
For some of us, people who tend to be fairly objective when it comes to the nature of things, including nature itself, the calamity comes under the general heading of stuff happens. At such times, even those of us who claim to be non-believers thank God that we ourselves were spared such unholy devastation.
Actually, when such a disaster takes place, one of the few positive things to say for it is that it tends to make people more appreciative of their own weather. That good-for-nothing tramp Katrina made every American who didn’t have to deal with her grateful that they merely have to cope with heat waves and humidity. In the same way, the Northridge earthquake, whose epicenter was a scant two miles due west of our home, made even the folks in Minnesota and North Dakota ecstatic that they merely had to dig their way out of snow, and not out of rubble.
Another plus was that Katrina served to knock the self-aggrandizing Cindy Sheehan out of the public eye when it had begun to seem she might remain there forever.
The other upside to Katrina is that it provided so many people with the opportunity to behave honorably, generously, even heroically, and to remind us that, in spite of tons of evidence to the contrary, perhaps the human race actually deserves to survive, after all.
The people I could not begin to fathom were those like Robert Kennedy, Jr., the self-proclaimed energy conservationist who flies hither and thither in private jets, who blamed President Bush for the disaster. If only he had signed the Kyoto Accord, according to Kennedy and his cronies, Katrina would have been nothing more than a gentle breeze. Working their selective memories overtime, they ignore the fact that hurricanes have been with us far longer than George Bush has been in the White House, longer even than there’s even been a White House or an aerosol can. They also overlook the fact that the levees have been a disaster just waiting to happen for the past several decades, and yet Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton, did nothing about it.
It begs the question whether there is any evil, any calamity, that could take place anywhere on earth that the far left wouldn’t lay at the feet of George Bush. When you start scapegoating the president for the pranks of Mother Nature, where does it end? Their hatred of Bush is so all-encompassing that I suspect it must strike even many of those who don’t share the man’s politics as preposterous. I suppose they will next suggest that the snake in the Garden of Eden hissed with a Texas accent.
The truth is, if anybody is to blame for the misery in New Orleans, it’s Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, who ignored the warnings of his engineers, in 1718, when he created a settlement below sea level in a swampland between the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Voila, New Orleans!
Leave it to a Frenchman.
BurtPrelutsky@aol.com
http://www.burtprelutsky.com/
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