Human Nature: Tribal

Government Impotence: Inexcusable

The Latest Rant by Yours Truly

The monetary cost of rebuilding areas of the gulf region destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina will be in excess of one hundred billion dollars. Many hundreds, if not thousands of lives have been lost in the wake of this disaster, both directly related to the storm, but also from hunger, dehydration, lack of proper medical attention, and crime – just to mention a few. It is possible to conflate hunger, dehydration and crime into one category – that would be labeled 'direct and immediate results of governmental negligence.’ The tragedy of lives lost due to the lack of sanitary facilities, food and safety - all begs a question; How many lives could have been spared had there been proper resources, both human and material in place prospectively, before and immediately after the storm did its thing?

I was a victim of a crime earlier this week. A person or group of persons somehow got hold of the number on my ATM card as well as my PIN and began siphoning money out of my account over a period of about 4 days. I usually don’t check my balance that often so basically my account showed a balance of 0$ by the time I saw it. I wasted a day of work dealing with this, not to mention burning precious gasoline driving to Fullerton California to file a police report. I’m stressed, angry, and also scared. I fear using plastic money for any purpose, or in any setting. I fear that the crooks actually still have access to my account and are just waiting to pounce again.

I know that while my fears are justifiable, they are probably not entirely rational. After all, I needed to and was ultimately able to get on with my business. Am I going to carry a couple hundred dollars in cash around with me wherever I go? Yeah, our parents probably used to do that when we were kids; when credit cards represented a different class, when Visa and Diner’s Club were basically it, and credit was something earned via personal integrity, or at very least by being one heck of a good player.

Stealing a stranger’s money can in fact be rational. If your goal is to have enough money in your bank account, to own a car and fill it with gas, have a place to live and food to eat, then finding some way of acquiring money is simply essential, and practically all means are born out of rational decision making. Yes, I think I was taught either through explicit lessons, i.e. teacher said “don’t steal because bla bla bla . . “ or I saw Hawaii five-O and guys who stole got the crap beat out of them by Danno. All in all, I pretty much figured out that stealing was a bad idea. Although I did steal The Rutles 'All You Need is Cash' (a vinyl LP) from a church carnival about 24 years ago, so I didn’t learn very well. Or perhaps I learned with caveats, like if you’re going to take something, then have a solid reason. Mine was that I REALLY wanted that album, and so even my feable attempt at winning the toss-it game or whatever before snatching the record from behind the stall somehow justified my desperate act. So my snake brain stole, and my cerebrum rationalized it.

I think it became more about stealing and not getting caught, as opposed to ‘stealing is bad.’ By and large I’m not a big thief, but there are shades of gray between career criminality and the perfect citizen, i.e. not informing the cashier that he gave you too much change. I don’t do that, but I’m not sure I would consider it outright theft either. In such a scenario, does having driven 5 blocks or from the store absolve you of the need to turn the car around for all of 50¢ ?

Stealing is on the spectrum of deviant behaviors, like peeing in public, or flicking a cigarette butt out the window. But is it deviance if nobody sees or cares that it’s happening? Is it deviant to loot from an abandoned store if the authorities recognize that looting is the only means of survival? Of course there are degrees. Stealing 50 cents from a payphone change slot and purposely dumping a bucket of urine on Rodeo Drive are two very different acts. Who decides, and when, that the rules are suspended? Is that a sub-section of rules included in the social contract we signed at birth? Forget for the moment about what is punishable by statutes because lots of things merit punishment while other things only warrant it.

Shooting at a rescue helicopter both merits and warrants immediate and severe punishment. If you don’t agree with that, then don’t bother reading more because we’re on different planets. Looting for profit in a zone of great devastation is reprehensible. It symbolizez a complete abyss in the values that our systems of education and faith are supposedly there to teach. It too merits punishment and warrants a response worthy of the act. However there are urgent needs that aren’t being met right now. And our president is appointing his predecessor and his daddy to raise private funds for victims. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been allocated toward shock, awe, the spreading of liberty, and the buttressing of a crony regime while Bush Senior and Clinton have been sent out to conduct the equivalent of a bake sale to help mitigate the suffering in our gulf region.

Theft is an act whereby an individual is deprived by another of property, money, means, rights, or to life itself. I posit that this administration has deprived the already needy and impoverished masses of people living in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to their basic rights. It’s as if they’ve been handed a copy of the Constitution with sentences blacked-out. Many have been abandoned by authorities, herded into badly planned refugee housing, or simply left to die without basic means of survival. And yet this very same administration has ordered a ‘zero tolerance’ policy (see my previous entry entitled Zero Tolerance plus One) regarding looting in the devastated areas. In my opinion, it is high time that the masses in this country begin to immediately demonstrate zero tolerance for a government which has completely upside-down priorities regarding the welfare of its citizens.

A country with inestimable wealth, medical technology par excellence, superior means of transportation, and the strongest fighting force on the planet cannot seem to muster the necessary resources to save its citizens after a storm. Suddenly we need telethons, private charity dinners, and grassroots-internet efforts to help these masses get to some degree of equilibrium. Children are dying. People are wading in their own waste and garbage FOR DAYS, without hope or any indication of when the help is going to arrive. Hundreds of billions are being spent on an unpopular, un-winnable war overseas. And our president is sitting in front of us with that all too familiar deer in the headlights expression (the same one he had four years and a few days ago when he was reading Pokey The Goat). He doesn’t know what to do, or how to do it. Perhaps he should declare war on poverty. But no, he’ll just declare war on the looters. He'll siphon off resources from victim relief to fight looters. He’ll stupidly proclaim that nobody had any idea that the levies would fail while earlier this year a huge government-sponsored commission met to study “Hurricane Pam” - a hypothetical disaster in New Orleans - and guess what folks – that’s right - the levies were breached in hypothetical “Hurricane Pam.”

I must say that the single largest revelation has been watching the footage of all the unfortunate people victimized by the storm, left like the storm flotsam itself by their governing, elected officials. An overwhelming percentage of victims seem to be black people. Say it isn’t so. This isn’t just classism (as if ‘just’ isn’t bad enough).

One last thing. Bill Clinton should publicly come to a podium and declare that he has every intention of marshaling human and material resources to benefit and save the victims. In the same breath he should then point a finger straight at the White House and ask the nation where its leader is. Where are the tax dollars being siphoned? Where is the corporate welfare pissed away? Where are the helicopters, the shock and awe of Americans coming to save other Americans?!?! But he probably won't.