More on evacuating

By way of jwz and Making Light, here's another really good posting about why some people didn't evacuate.

The news coverage so far is demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of what it's like to be poor, both in the coverage of evacuations and economic consequences and in the coverage of the looting. It's not that everything they're saying is wrong; it's that they're very clearly not looking at things outside of their own perspectives, and simply do not understand what it's like to be part of the working class poor. It gives so much of what they're saying a surreal bias, and explains in part why there's so much focus on gas prices and looting.

Intentionally or not, cynically or not, it's clear that the evacuation plans for the city simply abandoned 20% of the population. The evacuation system in place relied on private transportation and private funds, and so far as I've heard, there was no concerted effort to turn the city's mass transit infrastructure towards evacuation. This should have political consequences in any sane world. I hope it does.

Thanks to Paul Walker also for the link.

Posted: 2005-08-31 14:10 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04