You know, Gentle Reader, how there’s this whole thing where apologists for Our Only President and his aristocrats imply that the people who were still in New Orleans when Katrina hit were morons, and the response of Left Blogovia is that they were poor, and had no car, and there was no way for them to get out? Man, that’s bugging me. I mean, Left Blogovia is, more or less, right on that, at least that there were lots and lots of people who couldn’t get out. But it’s certainly true that there were lots of people who could have gotten out but chose to stay.\n
I’ve been meaning to write about this since reading Jaipur’s note<\/a>, and reading Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s note<\/a> from yesterday afternoon finally convinced me to take the time to gripe. Before I start griping, though, I’d like to reiterate that both Jaipur and Ms. Neilsen Hayden are essentially correct, and that there were certainly a lot of people who did not have a choice. To make any decisions or policy or even emotional response without knowing that is incredibly ignorant, deliberately ignorant. And both women write in response to a very real attack on the refugees’ character. I ain’t got no beef with them.\n But look. Imagine, for a moment, that you live in or near New Orleans. You’re poor. Not dirt poor, but poor. You’ve got a couple of jobs, maybe you wash dishes or bus tables at one of those tourist restaurants at night, and in the day you water the Garden district. You’ve got a car, a beater but it runs. Well, mostly it runs. Maybe the air-conditioning doesn’t work, or maybe the brakes are a bit squidgy, but hell, you’ve got a car. You’d better have a car, because you’d better get to work on time, because your boss is a fucking dickhead who would rather fire you than pay you, and your ‘landscaping’ job goes to whoever gets there first. But you’re doing all right, and because you get paid in cash and don’t have to wait for the 31st for your check, you’ve even got maybe twenty bucks in your pocket.\n There have been two or three evacuations recently, and nothing much happened. Maybe you evacuated for the first one. Went to stay in a motel in East Texas for a couple of days. That was fun. Cost you a couple of hundred bucks, once you count in gas and missed work. The kids were screaming all the way there, and all the way back, and one of them threw up in the back seat after you stopped at McDonald’s. Car still stinks. The second one, you stayed put. It was parade time, and you didn’t want to miss the tips. Plus, the oldest kid was old enough to go for the first time. So you stayed, and nothing much happened, and the parades were actually a lot of fun for the first time in years.\n So when they announce the evacuation, and the weather service sounds like John of Padmos, well, you really have to think about it. For one thing, that shithead at the restaurant was saying he would fire anybody that didn’t come in to work, hurricane or no. You call around a few cousins, but everybody’s either gone away themselves, or has a house full, so it’ll be a motel again and you don’t want to spend that kind of money. Also, there’s three-quarters of a gallon of milk in the fridge. Last time the power went out, there wasn’t much in the fridge, and you just ate it empty, but this time you just went shopping and there’s forty dollars of cold stuff. You could leave it there, and hope that at least the frozen stuff will be OK, unless the storm really is big and the power goes out. There’s no way you can keep that stuff cold on a road trip. And now that you think about it, what if the car breaks down in East Texas?\n You know, you finally get a few bucks together, get the damned credit card down from its limit, and you were thinking about buying—what, a new mattress for the bed? A window air-conditioner? A community college course on how to use a computer? Maybe a new used car? And now you’re going to blow the whole thing on some foolish evacuation because the weatherman says it’s the end of the world. Sure, you could<\/I> go. I mean, it’s your choice. You’re not one of those grandmas or children, or even one of those saps with a car but no gasoline. Your tank’s half-full. You are one of the lucky ones.\n What I’m saying is, it wasn’t necessarily an easy choice. Staying was the wrong choice, OK? I’m not saying that just because the storm turned out to be as bad as the weatherman said. Playing the odds, even behind the veil of ignorance, tells you that the right choice is to put the kids in the car and go. But there were people who chose<\/I> to stay, and I understand that choice, even as a rational choice, and I sympathize with it, even though it was wrong. That’s aside from a whole set of other things that have nothing to do with rational decision-making: a fierce desire to protect your home (even if it’s rented), a machismo surrounding evacuations that has built up over the last few years, indolence (and I sympathize with indolence, too), mistrust of the government (that’s not even irrational, is it?) and therefore of the warnings, and an illusion of invincibility. And, you know, there’s got to be some sympathy even for the irrational people. Even for the people who got scared and got drunk and got brave and said they were staying, dammit, because they were just damn staying.\n One side says that the people who stayed made a stupid choice, and therefore we don’t have to feel too bad about having killed them with our national negligence. The other side responds that the people who stayed had no choice at all, and therefore we must bear the responsibility for having killed them with our national negligence. The first argument disgusts me, not only because the second argument demolishes it, but because we bear the responsibility for having neglected the people who made the wrong choice<\/I>. You know, the undeserving poor. The prodigals. The sinners. The assholes. Them. We don’t get a free pass for killing them. Their sin, or stupidity, or even just their reckoning up the odds the wrong way doesn’t let us off the hook. I wish that Left Blogovia would say that, that’s all.\n chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>, You know, Gentle Reader, how there\u2019s this whole thing where apologists for Our Only President and his aristocrats imply that the people who were still in New Orleans when Katrina hit were morons, and the response of Left Blogovia is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17522,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions\/17522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"