Hell to Pay

Today's news from New Orleans is marginally better, "better" being a relative term given the unprecedented devastation that has been occurring in Southeast Louisiana. But I say that things are "better" seeing as how the work on the breached levee seems to be progressing. The tide is pulling the water back into Lake Pontchartrain and the water in affected areas is receding. With any luck the Corps of Engineers will have effectuated the plug before the next round of rain that will surely come soon. The National Guard has finally-finally!-arrived with men and materiel. The long overdue evacuation of Charity Hospital is finally underway now that the civilian helicopters are supported by fully armed Chinook helicopters sent up in order to dissuade sniper fire from the damned fools that have been inexplicably shooting at rescue workers as they attempted to extract folks. More on this later.

I don't know what it takes to qualify for a Congressional Medal of Honor or a similar award around here. But the next time they start to think about handing some out, I have a suggestion: How about the staffs of Tulane and Charity hospitals? Talk about holding down the goddamn fort! Tulane got its people out a couple of days ago but as of yesterday, the skeleton crew at Charity was working with no food, no water and very little electricity. They were ventilating people by hand. All of this while armed looters were thought be on the bottom floors of the vast building. God almighty. What devotion to duty. What bravery.

By contrast, let us now consider the human scum that has been busy stealing, causing even more property damage and shooting the place up. The story coming out now is that the authorities were surprised by the extent of this violence.

Please. Let me explain something.

In the first place, in Louisiana your homestead is exempt from property tax. In the second place, I would imagine that fully 45 percent of the buildings in Orleans Parish are owned by church or church related entities. So all of the owners of all those stately homes in the Garden District (for example) and all of those beautiful structures owned by the Roman Catholic Church (for another example)do not pay one nickel of property tax. And yet, they expect municipal services such as fire and police protection as if they did. They just expect it on somebody else's dime.

So this requires the Parish and City governments to fund municipal services out of general revenues for the most part. Which doesn't leave much for social services and public education. Which is too bad because, as the world is now seeing, New Orleans for all of it's old world charm and ambiance has one hell of a lot of poor people.

The public school system there is a joke. Nobody goes to public school except black kids on the lowest end of the strata. Public housing is horrific. The response of the City is to warehouse folks in the schools and in hellholes like the Desire Housing Project ( which was mercifully razed some time ago) and the St. Thomas Housing Project and just hope they cause the bare minimum of trouble during their sojourn through this vale of tears. And so you have a permanent population of an insufficiently civilized underclass that passes its collective sociopathy from generation to generation. Some of these people are exceptionally dangerous and live within easy proximity of Tulane and Charity and the French Quarter.

And they say they are surprised? Bullshit. They dealt with this problem much the way that they dealt with the issue of the potential arrival of a Category 4 hurricane. They just turned a blind eye and hoped for the best.

I do not say this to explain away the behavior of these punks or to assign blame to society. There is no time for such hand-wringing. Their shocking behavior is inimical to good order and public safety and must be stopped pretty much by any means. And so, there will be war in the streets tonight. There will be hell to pay for what they have done whether they did it for money, for thrills or for street cred. And much of the hell that will be visited upon these desperately stupid young men will be visited upon them by the 39th Infantry Brigade from here in Arkansas working alongside the local authorities. As we know, the 39th just got back from Iraq where they spent a year or so doing urban warfare at night. These thugs don't have a chance. Peace, even if it is an uneasy peace, will be restored.

There will be hell to pay at the polls as well. It will be interesting to see who the electorate blames for this debacle. The Feds? The State? Local government? It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

But there will be time enough for that. The time for tears has past. The earth can accept no more water. It is time to go to work. But first, pray that peace is restored so that search and rescue teams can work without bullets flying overhead. Pray that they get the water out sooner than later. And pray that, for future reference, somebody in the government remembers the old saying that "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

It applies to emergency readiness. It applies as well to social engineering.