Wages Of Deceit

The left - and the media - whipped a fair chunk of the nation into a frenzy last autumn in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, passing on rumors as news, and closing ranks behind Democrat mayor Ray Nagin and governor Kathleen Blanco. The negigence of the local and state officials was, in effect, covered up (but for the efforts of the alternative media); the tales of corruption-siphoned money and plans left unimplemented at the local and state levels buried beneath lurid, tall tales of carnage in the Superdome and an Antoinette-like legend of the feds leaving New Orleans to die.

It's been my belief all along that the Democrats - at least, the extreme wing of the party that's gained such sway over the party in the past five years - are playing the "Big Lie" game; repeat a lie (or enough lies) often enough that they become accepted as truth. Actually, it's simpler than that; they just have to toss enough out there, scattershot, to convince enough of their own people and the muddle-headed undecided to keep the true believers in an eternal state of conflict with...everyone else.

It seems that, as regards disasters (natural or man-made), it's working.

Someone posted this email on a Saint Paul politics email forum:The Iraq war?

OK, I digress. Or she digressed. Anyway, yes; the plan (according to some of the public health people I've talked with - is that one is pretty much on one's own.

As, indeed, one pretty much always is. I grew up in North Dakota; a family had to be prepared to go it alone for days at a time in case a blizzard whipped up. A good blizzard could keep a farm or small town isolated from the rest of the world for days. It's a fact of life; one's foremost responsibility in life is to protect one's family. More on that below.

I liked the > government support when we had Democrats in charge - > grump, grump!

One wonders - how would suspect a Democrat administration would treat an epidemic any differently. But the decay of this nation's Civil Defense infrastructure was, to say the least, a bipartisan piece of negligence - one that to some extent we're paying for now.

I say "bipartisan" in the interest of seeking clarity - but the whole notion that Civil Defense should be abandoned came from the idea that nuclear war was the disaster for which we planned, and it was unsurvivable (so said the naysayers), ergo why bother planning or preparing for any problem?

1) Will city water and sewage still be working?

One should ALWAYS assume that city services can go south on you. Even in the best of times, city utilities can pack up. Over the winter, a benzine spill left the city of Harbin, China without city water for weeks. To say "it couldn't happen here" is foolish optimism. It is prudent to keep a couple of days worth of drinking water stored up even in the best of times.

5) Can we organize food and water drop offs for houses with really sick people?

I'd suspect that depends on who "we" is. It's a good time to be a
member of a church (inclusively stated; synogogues, mosques, ashraams, temples, covens and cabals all qualify). They have always served that role, and odds are good that, just as in New Orleans, they'll continue to.

Here's the part that I really really frosted my cookies:

Last I
> heard, the Bush federal pandemic plans were to shoot people.

And...

The federal government kept help OUT of New Orleans.

I just sat, slack-jawed, for a moment or two after I read that.

It's hard to read this as anything but proof that the Big Lie strategy is "working" in the sense that it's created (among those zealous or dim enough to be persuaded) that the Feds - the most inertia-prone institution in this nation - are prone to swinging from unquestioning benificence to unbridled malignancy over the change of a president; worse, that people (some people, anyway) believe the tall tales passed by an dubiously-competent media (cannibalism, firefights in the streets of NOLA and so on) in the bag for a local and state government whose own incompetence and corruption led to people dying the buses that were supposed to carry them to safety marinaded in flood waters.

With a potential pandemic coming on, frankly, one of my biggest worries is that we have a people still conditioned, largely, to believe the news media. And the media showed, during Katrina, that they don't deserve that trust. I do NOT trust the mainstream media to get the truth of this story out. I also have my doubts about government at ALL levels.

Which is why I ask questions.

The letter continued:

I think we should have a plan the does not invite the federal government, allow Canada to help instead.

If, heaven forfend, the bird flu (or some other disease) makes the leap and becomes a human epidemic, it'll be interesting to see how Canadian socialized medicine - already creaking under the load of providing routine care to Canadians - copes with the epidemic (which will certainly not respect borders), or, for that matter, if we'll hear the truth about the Canadian response from our mainstream media.

It doesn't matter what party you believe in, or what letter your elected officials put after their name; government is government is government, and keeping YOU, as an individual, alive is not the top item on its agenda (preserving *order* is; the two goals are not always the same); on a good day, it's #2. You are ALWAYS, at the end of the day, on your own.

Which doesn't stop me from asking questions of our government. More on that tomorrow.

Posted by Mitch at April 7, 2006 12:17 PM | TrackBack