Further Ranting (and then I'm done)

The government just gave New Orleans relief fund 58 BILLION dollars!!

Have you been to New Orleans? If it was totally destroyed down to rubble and had to be rebuilt from scratch it wouldn't cost 58 billion dollars. Sure Bourbon Street is fun, but once you set foot off of that street it's like walking through that invisible wall in Time Bandits.

I'm sorry people lost their homes, but a lot of my sympathy went out the door when shooting of rescue helicopters and harassing of rescue officers began not but one day after the effort to get peopole out. Then 40% of the debit cards given out ($2,000 a piece) were spent on non-essential items (as verified by the merchants who cashed the things) such as t.v.'s and other luxury items. Sure not everyone took part in these blatant acts of stupidity but it is defintiely the 1,000 bad apples poil the tree kind of theory for me on this one. I blame the city of New Orleans for not getting these people out (no demanding they leave) when they should have. If people stayed voluntarily through this and still expect help when the inevitable struck them - well tough titties. For the people who couldn't get out, they should have been removed. They knew this was going to be bad (we had 5 days of warning about this storm on the west coast for christ's sake) they should have extracted them into shelters while they had days to do so. All this just about killed it for me.

There has been well over 300 million donated by sports organizations, 58 billion by the feds, a couple mil in debit cards for immediate help, countless rescue workers being harassed for trying to save people and they still want private citizens to take a hit on their paycheck day after day? Yeah sorry, noble cause and all (for the beginning) but I think they're ready to put the money to use.

I don't like watching people get hurt, but I really don't like watching the American public get guilded in the name of charity. Unless this money is being fully documented on exactly where it's going, I can't see giving any cash (especially after federal relief). Natural disasters are often horrific and never controllable (although some politically over-active people would like to blame everything and anything on those with power), however there are plenty of other disasters that go unchecked and uncared for day after day in this country with no attention whatsoever. I can't see how this is any worse than some of the other things going on in this country nowadays (and for a while as well).

Donate if you will, but know that you are donating blindly into a cause that is already well-funded by the agencies that are there to fund these type of things in the first place. I'm not going to get into why other countries around the world won't help us out (sans 1 or 2 with this hurricane deal) when we are constantly either bailing them out of trouble or being begged to help them financially at each and every turn.

It's gotten old. I'm sorry this happened, but it did and no amount of hearings over what went wrong will get things back to normal. Something messed up, fine, get over it and move forward. Start using the money for what it's intended for and cut the begging out. There's enough to get started, finsihed, destroyed, started and finished again.

You can't go forward if you're always looking behind you.

Whew! All better now.

So - - tits? boob? farts? dick? poopy pants?