Friday Night Dumpster-Diving
By John Hawkins at Townhall, in one of recent memory’s most extraordinarily ill-disguised racist tirades:
Two years after Katrina, everywhere you turn, there are people carping, whining, and kvetching. Just why hasn’t the pity party for the citizens of New Orleans run out of booze and chips yet?
It’s not as if hurricanes are a once a millennium event in the United States. In fact, residents of Florida have so many of them that they don’t even cancel a barbecue for anything under a Category 3.
Moreover, people lose their homes in this country every day of the year. If it isn’t a hurricane, it’s an earthquake. If it isn’t an earthquake, it’s a tornado. If it isn’t a tornado, it’s a fire. If it isn’t a fire, it’s a flood. Yet nobody sits and frets about John Doe, age 58, who lost his house in a flash flood two years ago or Jane Doe, age 60, who had her house blown away by a twister back in 2005.
But, we’re all supposed to eternally sit around and weep tiny little tears of sadness for the people who really took it on the chin in a hurricane because they chose to live in a city shaped like a soup bowl on the coast. Let me tell all the citizens of New Orleans something that should have been told to them 18 months ago: it’s time to stop playing the sympathy card and get over it.
Nobody is owed a living for the rest of his life because he had a bad break two years ago. Yet, we still have people affected by Katrina who have FEMA paying their rent. How sad and pathetic is it that these shiftless people are still leaching off their fellow citizens? Since when is being in the path of a hurricane supposed to give you a permanent “Get Out of Work Free” card?
I’ll venture two low-risk, counter-factual observations here: (1) if the victims in New Orleans had not been predominantly black, this piece would never have been sieved from the toilet in John Hawkins’ apartment; (2) if words like “New Orleans” and “Katrina” were replaced with “New York” and “9/11,” John Hawkins would be spending this evening in a meat locker somewhere, dangling upside-down like a dressed deer.