Originally Posted by
spywizard
There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. (Everybody's
asking.)I'm tempted to say, the only difference from Canada, is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.
But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something
happened Up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources toArrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same Way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C.
The theory being, that when you're in real trouble, that's where the
adults live. And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has
worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been
military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands,
finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military, efficiently cobbling together a recovery
operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly
institution.
We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless
government after another, who have cut corners until there is nothing
substantial left.
We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few
soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a
Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.
From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the
People who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New
Orleans showed a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its
underclass.
This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in
Assisted housing, receive food stamps and prescription medicine and
government support through many other programmes. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, sans input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of Transit and school buses parked in rows to be lost in the flood, that could have driven them out of town.
Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or
Later we must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the
sort of haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the
Floodwaters rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one's
heart goes out. But already the survivors are being put up in new
accommodations, and their various entitlements have been directed to
new locations.
The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are
Yet no statistics, but I'll wager the most generous state in the union
will Prove to have been arch-Republican Texas, and that nationally,
contributions In cash and kind are coming disproportionately from people who vote Republican.
For the world divides into "the mouths" and "the wallets".
The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch
With reality, as to raise questions about the bashers' state of mind.
Consult any authoritative source on how government works in the
United States, and you will learn that the U.S. federal government's legal, constitutional, and institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero.
Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring
A disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets,
Two full days in advance of the stormfall. In the little time since, he
Has managed to coordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest
in Human history -- without invoking martial powers. He has been
sufficiently Presidential to respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily
mendacious and childish blame-throwing.
One thinks of Kipling's "If --" poem, which I learned to recite as a
lad, and mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern
leftoids and gliberals to apoplexy -- as anything that is good,
beautiful, or true:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise...
Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by
these
verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.
David Warren
C Ottawa Citizen
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