Mover Mike

I am going to take exception with an article written by Doug Saunders in The Globe & Mail, a British newspaper. In Nasty, brutish — society's net snaps Saunders was appalled by images from New Orleans. You know the ones!

At one point yesterday, as a helicopter-mounted camera showed a teeming swell of furious, gun-toting Louisiana residents mobbing a busload of supplies, a stunned British TV anchor spoke his mind on the air: "I'm having trouble believing that we're watching the continental United States of America. I mean, it looks like Rwanda."

Saunders opines

...the large U.S. cities of the South have a very different sort of group psychology, in which faith in individual fortune replaces the fixed social roles that keep other places aloft during crises.

In U.S. cities like New Orleans, in the analysis of the American-British organizational psychologist Cary Cooper, social cohesion depends on a shared belief that individual hard work, good luck and God's grace will bring a person out of poverty and into prosperity. But those very qualities can destroy the safety net of mutual support that might otherwise help people in an emergency.

"Fear itself motivates people in the U.S. — the fear that you could lose everything," Prof. Cooper said in an interview yesterday from his office at the University of Lancaster. "That creates the best in American society, the inventiveness, but the moment the net is pulled out, it becomes a terrible jungle."

He says looting did not occur in Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the Tsunami, or in the polarized society of Montreal after the ice storm. It didn't occur in New York after 9/11 or the floods in the Dakotas. Why did it occur in New Orleans? He says it is because we are too individualistic, too self reliant, too reliant on hard work. That's BS!

Let's say it! Those disasters he points to were not in African-American communities. Cosby has talked about this. The politicians and black leaders have failed this once proud community. They are not self reliant. They are waiting for the government to get them out of their misery. They are victims and victims can't figure out how to help themselves. Self-reliant people would have followed their elected officials advice to get out of town. They would have organized a means to take care of their own without waiting for instructions. I have been listening to Ringside's song Dreamboat 730. These four lines typify the problem and appeal of gangs:

Come aboard – lets go dreaming
No one’s gonna love you like we love you
We understand you’ve been mistreated
Been kicked around – we’ll get even

You think I'm kidding about politicians letting these people down. The Democrats have the African-American voters in their hip pocket. Look who the leaders of Lousiana are:

New Orleans has a Democrat Mayor, a Democrat City Council, and a Democrat Chief of Police. Louisiana has a Democrat Governor, a Democrat Lt. Governor, a Democrat Attorney General; 24 of 39 Louisiana State Senators are Democrat, 67 of 105 Louisiana State House Representatives are Democrat, there's a Democrat Representative in the House from New Orleans, and one of two Senators in the Senate is a Democrat.

We need more emphasis on self reliance not less. We need to stop thinking of the government as our parents, because really, the government will always fail us. It will never anticipate. We will always be left asking, "How could this happen? Why didn't the government do something?" Government is made up of people who don't get ahead by being self reliant. They exist to get along. The peg that is higher on the board of life gets pounded down!