Boileryard: When Everybody Else Is Wrong
You ever read something that, although you hadn’t thought about it before, makes total sense? Boileryard Clarke did that for me today.
Ray Nagin is the mayor of New Orleans. In the past two or three days he has been the loudest (and most profane) voice in the country criticizing government agencies for their slow reaction to the disaster in his city. But a question is starting to pop up that kind of informs itself on what we all know about human nature; the best way to deflect blame is to blame somebody else.
So why didn’t the Mayor of New Orleans realize that tens of thousands of his citizens did not have transportation out of town, were essentially stranded, and do something to organize some kind of transportation for at least somebody?
Did he not understand the demographics of his own city?
After telling everyone to get out, serving people who had transportation of their own right nicely, he booked and left his “constituency” stranded. What, exactly, did he expect these people to do? Walk?
Well he’s not exactly Rudy Guliani is he? He sounds more like a street musician who just woke up from a drunk… man.
He is quoted as saying “Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get it here to New Orleans… I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. Now get off your ***** and fix this. Let’s do something and let’s fix the biggest ****** crisis in the history of this country.” A great idea - but where was it a week ago?
Aren’t there busses in New Orleans? Do trains come in and out of the city? With long lines of cars trailing out of the city before Katrina hit, did it ever occur to him to think about people who didn’t have cars and use his own resources to get people out before the hurricaine hit? Brains are resources too, don’t you think?
How is it that now he has this great idea about what the federal government is supposed to do to fix the mess he left his own city in, but when he was busy scrambling around trying to save his own neck he just plain forgot about the sick and the needy and the poor and the hospitals? Why didn’t the mayor figure out a way to evacuate the hospitals?
There’s more; go read it.