the Centrist

I am tired of hearing that America failed her people during Katrina. Yes, it is unfortunate that those people were not better served by our government, but seriously, if there was a Cat 5 hurricane bearing down on my home … with the real chance of devastating flooding, I would get my kids and wife out of town if I had to carry them on my back. It is that simple.

Many would say, “Yea, that’s easy for a guy who never lived in the projects amongst gangs, drugs, and prostitutes.” Well, sorry to spoil your intolerance, but we have lived in public housing. And I can assure you, my public housing neighbors in the mid sixties would have pitched in and we would have ‘gotten out of town’ if faced with the same impending doom. We simply would not have waited for help from big brother. We would not have let our poverty get in the way of saving our families. In those days poverty and responsibility were not oxymoronic. Most of our neighbors were either disabled or on welfare. Many did not have a car. Others made a living, shall we say via a very old profession, yet those same ladies of the night, were, for the most part, angels by day. We struggled individually and corporately to bring pride and hope into that blighted neighborhood. I can assure you that we realized the peril of our environment, but each family had enough concern for his/her neighbor to look in on each other on a daily basis. This was not a predominately white neighborhood. Yet when the east side of Buffalo erupted into riots during the civil rights protests it was our neighbors of color who stood by our side and prevented violence from entering that area.

Because money was both in short supply, yet a necessity for my family I worked every other night, all night, at the Buffalo General Hospital. Yet I felt secure leaving my family because those same neighbors looked in on them to ensure their safety each time I was away. They did not expect anything in return, nor did we when we would have the area kids in for cookies and milk, organize kickball games, or stand up with them for confirmation or baptism. Faith and friendship was the common thread that wove its way through our ghetto. It enveloped our community and school system. Although none of us had material goods, we all had an abiding Christian faith and love for one another. Care and concern for each other naturally flowed from that foundation.

That is what was lacking in New Orleans last summer and is lacking in many of our inner city communities today. While we can assess blame the real tragedy lies in the failure of the liberal welfare mentality within those neighborhoods. Nobody dares say that the Democratic Party has created a whole new society of inner city Americans who expect rather than produce. Can you remember when a young executive from Medina rushed down to the site to provide aid, via jobs and housing for these ‘victims’? Although there were a plethora of ‘victims’ paraded before us nightly on the cable, he returned with no takers … none. Nobody wanted to work themselves back to dignity, because that community had long ago abandoned that value. The real problem here is that those Americans have embraced a sick kind of socialism. One in which they prefer the label of permanent victim, rather than rugged individualism. To them, it will always be somebody else’s fault … for everything that goes wrong in their lives. Their leftist politicians have provided them with just enough from government aid to survive. That makes them dependent on those elected officials for food and shelter. Is it any wonder they vote them back into office?

It should come as no surprise that fraud is rampant in the area. According to the “USA Today” the census revealed that although there were 398,629 households in four parishes … yet there were 481, 624 FEMA claims … that tallies out to 166 million dollars in overpayments. Few have reported that we Federal Taxpayers had previously provided enough funds to properly repair those levees … but the funds somehow got diverted and or siphoned off for other projects.

Then we have the poster child for whining, Mayor Nagin. While his city was threatened with flooding for days as Katrina took dead aim at his contractual obligation … he never even fired up one of the 500 fueled municipal buses in an attempt to get his people to high ground. When asked why he provided his emergency workers with vacations for trips to Vegas and Atlantic City in the middle of the disaster he answered: ‘You’ve got to understand, New Orleans is a party town’ … as if flood victims would find that or his reference to the lamentation that New Orleans is no longer ‘chocolate’ amusing. Can anybody remember the year before when Florida was devastated with four hurricanes in one season? Their coastline was battered and laid in ruin. Yet FEMA was no where to be found for many more days that the ‘critical four’. It was the state and local governments, the neighborhoods and people, who helped one another and rebuilt their state. There were no homeless waiting for handouts months after the disaster. Florida took care of their own on every level and FEMA aided, not provided, the recovery. This occurred because Florida is not chocolate, vanilla, or caramel … neither color, nor dependence was the issue. Florida, not unlike our blighted 60’s public housing neighborhood, depended on their faith, independence, and individual responsibility rather than government handouts to rebuild.