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West_africa Veteran Poster Username: West_africa Post Number: 60 Registered: 08-2005 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!)

Posted on Wednesday, September 07, 2005 - 08:43 pm: |

How might we have been better prepared in New Orleans ?
It's time to deal with realities.
Roxie
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 09:57 am: |

Well, for starters, someone should've taken the warnings seriously:
------------------------------------------------
Monday, August 29, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
Warnings of the "big one" ignored for many years
By MATT CRENSON
The Associated Press
When Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans today, it could turn one of America's most charming cities into a vast cesspool tainted with toxic chemicals, human waste and even coffins released by floodwaters from the city's legendary cemeteries.
Experts have warned for years that the levees and pumps that usually keep the city dry have no chance against a direct hit by a Category 5 storm.
That's exactly what Katrina was as it churned toward the city. With top winds of 160 mph and the power to lift sea level by as much as 28 feet above normal, the storm threatened an environmental disaster of biblical proportions, one that could leave more than 1 million people homeless.
"All indications are that this is absolutely worst-case scenario," Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, said yesterday.
The center's latest computer simulations indicate that by tomorrow, vast swaths of New Orleans could be under water up to 30 feet deep. In the French Quarter, the water could reach 20 feet, easily submerging the district's cast-iron balconies and bars.
Estimates predict that 60 percent to 80 percent of the city's houses will be destroyed by wind. With the flood damage, most of the people who live in and around New Orleans could be homeless.
"We're talking about in essence having — in the continental United States — having a refugee camp of a million people," van Heerden said.
"New Orleans is never going to be the same," National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield told The Miami Herald.
Aside from Hurricane Andrew, which struck Miami in 1992, forecasters have no experience with Category 5 hurricanes hitting densely populated areas.
"Hurricanes rarely sustain such extreme winds for much time. However we see no obvious large-scale effects to cause a substantial weakening of the system and it is expected that the hurricane will be of Category 4 or 5 intensity when it reaches the coast," National Hurricane Center meteorologist Richard Pasch said.
As they raced to put meteorological instruments in Katrina's path, wind engineers had little idea what their equipment would record.
"We haven't seen something this big since we started the program," said Kurt Gurley, a University of Florida engineering professor who works for the Florida Coastal Monitoring Program, which uses mobile weather stations to make detailed measurements of hurricane-wind conditions.
Experts have warned about New Orleans' vulnerability for years, chiefly because Louisiana has lost more than a million acres of coastal wetlands in the past seven decades. The vast patchwork of swamps and bayous south of the city serves as a buffer, partially absorbing the surge of water that a hurricane pushes ashore.
Levees won't help
Experts have also warned that the ring of high levees around New Orleans, designed to protect the city from floodwaters coming down the Mississippi, will only make things worse in a powerful hurricane. Katrina is expected to push a 28-foot storm surge against the levees. Even if they hold, water will pour over their tops and begin filling the city as if it were a sinking canoe.
After the storm passes, the water will have nowhere to go.
In a few days, van Heerden predicts, emergency-management officials are going to be wondering how to handle a giant stagnant pond contaminated with building debris, coffins, sewage and other hazardous materials.
"We're talking about an incredible environmental disaster," van Heerden said.
He puts much of the blame for New Orleans' dire situation on the very levee system that is designed to protect southern Louisiana from Mississippi River floods.
Before the levees were built, the river would top its banks during floods and wash through a maze of bayous and swamps, dropping fine-grained silt that nourished plants and kept the land just above sea level.
The levees "have literally starved our wetlands to death" by directing all of that precious silt out into the Gulf of Mexico, van Heerden said.
It has been 40 years since New Orleans faced a hurricane even comparable to Katrina. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy, a Category 3 storm, submerged some parts of the city to a depth of 7 feet.
Since then, the Big Easy has had nothing but sideswipes. In 1998, Hurricane Georges headed straight for New Orleans, then swerved at the last minute to strike Mississippi and Alabama. Hurricane Lili blew out its strength at the mouth of the Mississippi in 2002. And last year's Hurricane Ivan obligingly curved to the east as it came ashore, barely grazing a grateful city.
Louisiana historically has had weak building codes and questionable enforcement. New Orleans' housing stock is virtually all wood-framed, and often aged and dilapidated. Many structures have been weakened by a relentless exotic termite infestation.
The prevalent hurricane code in Louisiana has been what engineers consider the bare minimum — that buildings be designed to withstand 100-mph winds.
Homes are doomed
"There's a lot of older homes, most of these homes are below sea level, most of these homes are termite ridden," said Capt. Lou Robinson, a training instructor with the City of New Orleans Fire Department. "The newer homes, construction-wise, they just meet minimum requirements. You know, just for cost effectiveness, they scrimp. The roofs are manufactured with trusses or lightweight metal but they just don't hold up under extreme conditions."
Worst-case scenario? The city could lose half its homes, Robinson said.
Robinson said he doesn't expect to have a home after the storm passes. He built his home in 2000 himself to the strongest codes, but it's outside of the levee system.
"It's just not going to handle this level of wind and water," he said.
Levitan noted that a new state task force was supposed to meet for the first time this week to begin developing recommendations for strengthening Louisiana's building codes and practices.
"Our thought was we could be proactive and not have to wait until after we got smacked," Levitan said. "I guess that's not going to happen."
Information from the Miami Herald on building codes is included in this report
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
Chrishayden
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 10:46 am: |

September 8, 2005
The Political Forces Behind the Flood
Legacy of Neglect
By ROGER MORRIS
Former National Security Council staffer
The calamity was enormous, the toll in lives and ruin like nothing the country knew. Yet the ultimate disaster was in the staggering negligence of the government and its oblivious leader. Despite years of warnings and then the stark sight of suffering, help was disgracefully slow, too late for so many. "People must realize now," one witness wrote in her diary, "how rotten the structure has become." Long afterward, historians would think it a breaking point in trust, the moment when the future began.
No, not the great New Orleans flood of 2005. The great Russian drought and famine of 1891. Not George W. Bush. But a similarly fey Nicholas II. Not a breaking point in America perhaps, though there are intriguing parallels.
As most of the world knows, the grim search for the dead has now begun in New Orleans, and among the casualties already is much of the credibility of the Bush Administration. From startlingly bold coverage, the scenes of tragedy in picture and print are indelible: Frail old ladies slumped rag-doll dead across their wheelchairs. Lifeless babies in someone's helpless arms. Families on rooftops waving frantically and in vain. A hospital patient who could not be rescued amid the rising water and was euthanized by a desperate nurse - "We're going to help him to heaven," she said to the sobbing young doctor who later told the story. Not least, the barely describable horror of thousands trapped and left in the Superdome, the enveloping squalor symbolic of the building's own squalid history as another of America's coliseum monuments to public plunder for private greed.
Then, of course, there were those other scenes: As sodden, long-neglected levees crumbled and a great city sank beneath the tide, President Bush flew off heedlessly to the West Coast to celebrate his triumphs of national security. As Americans begged to be taken from catastrophe, Vice-President Dick Cheney continued taking his vacation in Wyoming. As bloated corpses went floating on the flood, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went shopping Fifth Avenue for a small fortune in shoes. Asked later her thoughts on the victims from her kindred South, the Secretary offered with her usual authority, "The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time. If we just wait."
Like an old French graveyard upturned by the torrent, the history of the debacle near and far has come bobbing inescapably to the surface. There were chillingly graphic warnings for decades, of course, from the files of federal, state and local governments to the pages of National Geographic. Developers came to eat away the fragile shield of shoreline, but no funding came to shore up what everyone knew to be the last line of defense at the levees.
It took five to six days for us to watch much of New Orleans die, the cries go silent, the rooftop begging vanish. But the real killing of the city took a quarter century and more. The Corps of Engineers budgets slashed and states starved by Washington's tax cuts for the wealthy, endless enriching of special interests, gathering orthodoxy of greed and abandonment of the common good - all grotesquely garbed as conservatism or fiscal responsibility.
It hardly began with George W. Bush and the Republicans. The oligarchy that left New Orleans to its fate for so many years of borrowed time was thoroughly bipartisan. The disaster could never have happened without the Democrats, from Congress after Congress to the spectacle of Bill Clinton last week adding his clubbish alibi for the inexcusable failure of a government to read its own files.
Nor are we surprised to see racism lurking naked in policy and practice, or the regrettable atavism of the administration's primitive theology and its energy lobby accommodations that stoutly denied the global warming that may well have spawned Katrina. But no freedom from prejudice or ignorance now would have saved New Orleans from the criminal negligence of those decades that left a grindingly poor population at the mercy of decrepit dikes.
Of course, the war on Iraq and those who perpetrated it must bear the blame for the atrocity in New Orleans. Of course national guardsmen were in Mesopotamia, not Mississippi where they belong. Of course helicopters were running gauntlets in a lost war, not rescuing our own lost souls. But the war that presents so ready and simple a target is only part of the larger disaster, and the eventual going of Mr. Bush only part of coming to terms with the far wider, longer misrule.
Even then, hundreds, perhaps thousands, might still have been saved. A general of the Northern Command tells the BBC his relief force was in place over the precious final days, and was only awaiting presidential orders. The USS Bataan, it turns out, was offshore all along with vital help never mounted in time.
But nothing could save New Orleans from the dithering incompetent crony bureaucrats and insensate politicians who together have been the inevitable, necessary accompaniment of the oligarchy. Thus the cruel joke of FEMA Director Michael Brown, the former horse association impresario entrusted with the lives of tens of thousands, easily matched by Republican Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, the ex- wrestling coach as statesman, who helpfully suggested that much of New Orleans should be "bulldozed."
All this, we should note, in a New Orleans already one of the poorest of America's cities, a redolent casualty of the system long before Katrina. Where half the households make less than $28,000 a year, schools are a disgrace, the murder rate among the highest in the country, and a police force with more than 50 officers recently convicted of crimes. Into the cesspool of state politics will now pour at least $10-billion in federal aid with the same able bureaucrats and politicians overseeing it, adding appreciably to the "looting" of New Orleans.
It all gives new meaning to Homeland Security. Katrina has shown us unmistakably that there are two homelands, two distinct versions of Security in 2005 America. As New Orleans symbolizes so vividly, the country has its high ground and low, its rescued and expendable. In health care, education, jobs and a dozen other ways, in the far-reaching meaning and impact of the war on Iraq, one homeland will be secure, the other left to face the century's floodtides alone.
The plundering and heedlessness will go on as long as the system endures. Even now the blame is shifting to state and local officials. In the end, millions will believe, as millions already do, that the poor, thus benighted, city committed suicide - and, in sentiment suitably muted, good riddance.
I've worked with presidents Johnson and Nixon - tough nuts but capable of changing their minds. Those in power in Washington now speak directly to God; I have no hope that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are going to undergo some spontaneous conversion to a different way of thinking post-Katrina. What we can hope is that both Republicans and Democrats - in the Congress and those contemplating running in 2008 - sense the pressure for a major reversal of priorities, for troops to be brought home and resources reapportioned to true homeland security. And this pressure may just force the administration's fiercely grudging hand at least to begin the process. A slim hope.
And what of charming old New Orleans and environs, portal to a fourth of the nation's trade, refinery of every tenth tank of gas, that and more. Perhaps foolishly rebuilt and wanly defended as the funds inevitably dwindle. Perhaps turned into a Cajun Venice in a country where tourism is always a last resort.
In any case, it will be a busy autumn. Supreme Court confirmations. The Plame scandal indictments. By Thanksgiving, between shots of feasting soldiers in Baghdad and turkey at the Crawford Ranch, the media should be showing smiling faces at the long-term shelters.
But who knows? Somewhere, as in the tortured Russia of 1891 there may be a diarist recording, "People must realize now....." Perhaps somewhere in the suffering and stench, the seeming immunity of the misbegotten powerful, there really has been a breaking point, however difficult to see or feel. Perhaps another future has begun for America, after all.
Roger Morris, an award-winning historian and investigative journalist who served on the National Security Council Staff under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, has just completed Shadows of the Eagle, a history of American policy and covert interventions in the Middle East and South Asia, to be published early next year by Alfred Knopf. Morris is the author of Partners in Power: the Clintons and Their America and with Sally Denton The Money and the Power: the Making of Las Vegas. He may be reached at RPMBook@Gmail.com.
West_africa
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 12:07 pm: |

Cities with Largest Black Percentage of Population
City----------- Percentage of Total Population
Gary, IN.................... 85.3%
Detroit, MI................. 82.8%
Birmingham, AL........... 74.0%
Jackson, MS.............. 71.1%
New Orleans, LA......... 67.9%
Baltimore, MD............ 65.2%
Atlanta, GA............... 62.1%
Memphis, TN.............. 61.9%
Washington, D.C......... 61.3%
Richmond, VA ............ 58.1%
Source: U.S. Census, 2000
=====================================
Chrishayden
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 12:25 pm: |

West_Africa:
So what's your point? Do you think Memphis, Detroit, or Gary are in danger of being wiped out by a hurricane?
How about Biloxi? I don't see them on the list but they got it pretty bad, too.
Chrishayden
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 12:36 pm: |

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2005/katrina.html
This disaster did not just occur in New Orleans, though we are focusing on it because it was wiped out.
Three states were devastated. I am sure that several all white communities were wiped out--but I don't know them.
I do know that the majority in those three states is white, and that the government is in the hands of white people in those states.
So how might the white people have planned better for Katrina?
West_africa
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 12:43 pm: |

Chrishayden: You have got to be kidding...
Chrishayden
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 01:07 pm: |

No, I am not kidding.
And while we are at it, let's look at these cities. Black folks might be the majority, but white people control those towns--
We need to face up to reality. Money is what runs it in America. Big Business and Finance run America. You can have a town 100 per cent black, white folks will control it.
Take my city of St. Louis. Majority Black. Didn't make your list (they say we make up 52% of the population, I think its more, they fudge the numbers)
White folks control the Mayor's office, Board of Aldermen, School Board, Police Department--we got a black chief but he is hanging on by his fingernails, white folks make up the majority of fire fighters.
There is a group called Civic progress made up of CEOs of the biggest corporations in St. Louis. They call the shots. Like they do in every other town.
When voting time comes around, all you got to do is look and see who is spending all the dough on billboards, advertising, etc. You know who they are behind. Everybody gets on the bandwagon.
Take East St. Louis across the river. Town is all black. They got black mayor, police chief, board of aldermen.
But they ain't got no money. No businesses in town. White politicians in Belleville and the Casino Queen are running it.
You need to get off these machines or out of the library and quit fantasizing off statistics and find out how the world really works.
As a final shot, I'll bring up the 300 billion dollar black man--isn't that the amount of money they say the black community disposes of? Trouble is, by the time the majority of blacks get through paying their bills, they don't have two quarters to rub together.
How much of that 300 billion was on its way to the Gulf after Katrina struck? This morning I walked past three black people who were sleeping on the street. Locals. Everyday I see a dozens of black people who are lining up to get food. Some of them have jobs.
Ray Nagins down there in Nawllins was and is doing what the big businessmen in town tell him and no more or less.
No, I'm not kidding. But you are kidding--yourself.
West_africa
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 03:43 pm: |

"Chrishayden" :
Your thinking, on this matter, is passive...not potent. Your analysis is also inadequate. It is not complete, and, simultaneously, it is incorrect in many ways.
In meeting of capable minds, they would not argue with you, they would simply ask you to leave the meeting.
The ideas you've just expressed are rational, but it is an inferior caliber of rationality.
It may be that quite often you do know what you are talking about, but, in this matter, you do not know what you are talking about.
[ More later ]
Kola_boof
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 04:07 pm: |

West_africa
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 04:13 pm: |

Re: "Kola_boof" image
Interesting choice of images by our resident "mixed-up big mouth".
You should keep your family out of this.
Tonya
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 04:46 pm: |

Oh shit, West_africa ain't playin yall!
Chris said:
"Ray Nagins down there in Nawllins was and is doing what the big businessmen in town tell him and no more or less."
Tonya:
That's exactly why I laugh my head off when they try to blame any of this shit on him. Puleeeze!
Kola_boof
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 05:08 pm: |

TO ALL:
http://www.thumperscorner.com/discus/messages/2152/7213.html?1126213501
Kola_boof
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 05:15 pm: |

To West_Africa:
Is it because you're such a SLOW POKE at the keyboard that you overplay the psyche out?
We've all got your number, and I for one won't be replying to your posts. Talk all you want---but THOUSANDS MORE hear me than from you.
Uhn.
Kola_boof
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 05:18 pm: |

OH...
and Slow Poke (West_Africa),
BE SURE and put your mouse on the photo:
Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 08:01 pm: |

Well, West Africa, don't worry about Kola ignoring you. You can always direct your posts to "Tonya" and get the same effect. Talk about surrogates. LMAO!
Kola_boof
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 08:10 pm: |

Yeah, but Kola and TONYA are not the same person.
Anyone can write to Troy Johnson: troy@aalbc.com and have him confirm that.
Slow Poke and West_Africa seem to have something in common.
I do, however, apologize to Cynique for accusing her of being Slow Poke before..since they both live in the same area outside all that WIND.
Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 11:51 pm: |

I don't recall you ever accusing me of being Slow Poke, Kola. And gimme a break. Just because you do not have the same URL as Tonya doesn't mean she isn't yet another persona you have created, a ubiquitous, "authentically black" sista girl type character whose function is to either echo your views or, to just keep things interesting, challenge what you say, from time to time. Since you have your own site, you can get away with taking poetic license. You obviously are very computer literate and I don't put anything past you.
Cynique
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Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 12:17 am: |

BTW, if Slow Poke is West Africa, he really had me fooled. He didn't give himself away like some deceptive people do. I did wonder why West Africa never replied to any of my comments, and I was beginning to wonder whether "he" was really a "she", a stern, no-nonsense school teacher who was from Cynique's era. Who Knew?? I still loves ya, Slow Poke. LMAO
Tonya
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Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 01:28 am: |

Now, you know you wrong, Cynnique!
LEMME TELL YOU ONE THING:
You better be glaaaaad I don't know what the word "UBIQUITOUS" means!
Cuz if I did -- it would be *YOU* and *ME*, girlfriend!!!
HOW YOU LIKE THEM APPLES???
Tonya
Tonya
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Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 02:14 am: |

Now, you know you wrong, Cynnique!
My bad. I meant to say:
Now you know you wrong, Cynnique!
I don't want it to Pause -- I want it to flooooooow!
CUZ DAT'S HOW I GETS DOWN!!!
Cynique
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Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 11:05 am: |

What happened, "Tonya," did Kola edit your first post? And when is your twin Renata coming back? Hopefully she went to Aruba on vacation and got thrown to the fishies. Also, it's out of character for you not to know what "ubiquitous" means. You're supposed to be intelligent as well street-smart.
Chrishayden
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Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 11:09 am: |

West_Africa:
My thinking is passive and here you are on a discussion board on a literary site trying to stir folks up. You gots to go where the people are, chief, if you want to start with anything.
I am just being realistic. You ain't going to do anything. You are just venting or engaging in internet talk. I would rather be talking literature, at least you might have read a book. I don't see mobs in the streets over this. I didn't see mobs in the street in 2000 and 2004 after the elections like I did in Ukraine and Yugoslavia.
People seem to think that leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King got out and stirred things up themselves. People were already out. The folks wanting to start the boycott had already decided what they wanted to do, they went and got King as a spokesman.
Everybody seems to like what is going on just fine--oh they complain but that's it. All the middle and upper class negroes got out of New Orleans. They ain't sweating it.
West_africa
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Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 11:53 am: |

We need to think for a moment about the possibility that events in New Orleans weren't a chance occurrence.
Not even the storm.
Cynique
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Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 12:23 pm: |

I'm inclined to think that through the miracle of TV, what we are seeing for public consumption is a very focused and select picture of how things are in New Orleans and Biloxi. Disasters make for good news stories and they send ratings soaring. In the after math of the storm, talking heads are playing up every angle, and the "sob sisters" are out in full force, and through a chain of events, the whole country is caught up in the drama because the situation is so fraught with heroes and villains and pathos. Yes, it is a miserable situation down there in the low lands of Louisiana and Mississippi, but as they say - shit happens... Mother Nature does her thing, but Father Time exerts his influence and it all works itself out. (And that, folks, is the latest word from your friendly ol philosopher Cynique, sitting in the comfort of her home in the state of Illinois, in the country of America.)
Chrishayden
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Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 12:49 pm: |

West:
OK. We think it.
Now what?
Tonya
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Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 01:01 pm: |

Chris said:
I don't see mobs in the streets over this. I didn't see mobs in the street in 2000 and 2004 after the elections like I did in Ukraine and Yugoslavia.
Me:
As a people, we're a little too old for angry street fights, don't you think?
Chris also said:
All the middle and upper class negroes got out of New Orleans. They ain't sweating it.
Me:
Unfortunately, You're absolutely right about that, but there are some very small things that the rest of us can do in order to put us in a position to care for ourselves.
For example:
In one week I decided to quit smoking -- no more excuses!
I renewed my membership to the gym -- no more excuses!
I've decided to finish up paying off my student loans so that I can return to school -- no more excuses!
I've even decided to start doing some work -- while I'm at work -- no more excuses!
So you see, Chris, if we decide to take on the personal responsibilities that will make each one of us stronger, our ability to care for ourselves will increase, therefore, making it easier for us to rescue ourselves when it's time to do so.
The most powerful message that this storm illustrated was that even in the most deadly and dire of circumstances, there is absolutely no depending on WHITEY -- nor the BULLSHIT ASS UNCLE TOMS we call the black middle class.
BTW, Now do you understand why many of us use the phrase,
"NOT BLACK ENOUGH"???
If you don't know -- come to philly or New Orleans and ask somebody.
Tonya
Moonsigns
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Posted on Monday, September 12, 2005 - 06:04 pm: |

We definitely could have been more prepared! However, no matter how prepared, there is always going to be a element of chaos when natural diaster strikes. Man is flawed.
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1437
Registered: 03-2004

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Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 11:24 am: |

How do you prepare for this?
http://www.halturnershow.com/DiversFindExplosiveResidueOnRupturedLevy.html
Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 196
Registered: 09-2004

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Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 10:55 pm: |

Ya'll scaring me
LiLi..making a note not to invite some of these people to join in the.....
West_africa
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: West_africa
Post Number: 114
Registered: 08-2005

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Posted on Tuesday, October 04, 2005 - 11:12 am: |

The question, in concrete terms, asks what we might have done to demonstrate fully capable preparedness that would have allowed the losses to be minimalized.
How might we have been better prepared?

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