At 12:26 PM Tuesday 9/6/2005, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
Dave Land wrote:
>
> These are leaders who defined national security in terms of 9/11. The
> question is whether we will insist that the blighters we put in their
> places can think in terms of 8/29, too.
>
I feel sorry for the victims, but wasn´t here an alarm, calling
for evacuation from the city _3 days_ before Katrina hit?
Yup.
Now, let's suppose you are one of the poor people
there (or anywhere else). Everything you own is
in the house you live in, and of course you
cannot afford the rates for flood
insurance. (Dunno how it is in .br, but here,
flood insurance is something extra you must get
from a different source at an extra price if you
even can get it -- if you live in a flood-prone
area, you may not be able to get it at all. It
is not included in ordinary homeowner's or
renter's insurance, assuming you have
those.) You have no car, or, if you have one,
it's an old one which barely runs. Your main or
only source of income is welfare or disability
from the government, which comes once a month,
usually during the first few days of the
month. (Social Security disability is scheduled
to arrive on the 3rd of the month, frex, unless
that falls on a weekend or holiday, in which case
it is supposed to arrive on the preceding Friday,
so this month such payments arrived on the
2nd.) When you get your check, you pay your rent
and utilities, and whatever is left is what you
live on for the rest of the month. By the 25th
or so, you are hoping that you have enough food
in the house to stretch until the next check
comes in a week or so, because all the money from
the previous check has been spent on
necessities. An order comes for you to fill up
your car with (then) $2.50+/gal gas, drive
hundreds of miles, and check into a motel. What
do you use to pay for the gas and motel, your
sweet smile? You know that most times when a
hurricane has been predicted in the past, your
house has survived. And you know that if it
doesn't, you'll never see it or anything you
leave behind again (including your beloved pets
if the place you are going will not allow them --
you are leaving them to starve, drown, or be torn
to pieces by someone else's larger dogs when they
get hungry), and, as already mentioned, you have
no insurance that will replace it. If you do
ever get to come back, you know that you will
either find everything ruined by the flood water
or that the front door has been broken in and
anything of even slight value stolen and
everything else likely trashed by looters looking
for anything of value. If the power goes out,
you don't even have money to buy ice at the
regular price of around $1/bag, much less the
after-hurricane price of $4/bag or more, to keep
that little bit of food you have in your fridge
until next month's check comes, or your insulin
or other medication, from spoiling.
So, what do you do?
In my last Web Search, I even found a blog claiming to give
Darwin Awards to those that remained there.
Again, what would you do were you in their
situation? Do you stay and try to hold on to
what is familiar and what little of your life may
remain, or do you leave with nothing more than
the clothes on your back and whatever you may can
carry, no employable skills or chronic health
problems which prevent you from pursuing gainful
employment, so no substantial prospects for making a new life elsewhere, etc.?
As they say, being poor sucks, and the poor are
always hit hardest by disaster, whether natural
(frex, a hurricane or earthquake) or man-made
(frex, war). Even in the US, where you can have
two color TVs and a car and still be considered poor . . .
-- Ronn! :)
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