Originally posted by: Whoozyerdaddy
Good Lord............ Equivication. Rationalization. Justification. People like you drive me insane. You're always trying to play down the impact of 9/11 and make it seem as though it was less than it was.
There was nothing new revealed in the american psyche in regards to NO. In America, if you don't have enough money to protect yourself you will be screwed sooner or later. Sad but true. But there's nothing new about that. All Katrina did was emphasize the point. If you're shocked by that you must have been living in a cave for the last 160 years.
That's the negative view.
The positive view would be that millions of americans have donated their time and money to help people they will never meet. They have opened their homes and their wallets to ease the suffering of complete strangers. To tell you the truth, when you erase the government from the picture, we should all be proud of how the average person in this country has come to the aid of other average people who truly need our help. In my view that's a pretty positive view on the american psyche. Obviously our government leadership need a lot of work... but our collective psyche is right where it needs to be on this issue.
We knew our bureaucracies were bloated and ineffective before Katrina and Iraq. There's no surprise there. Shlt... We knew that before 9/11. We've known the federal government was a bloated whale since the 1780's. Half the arguments on P&N revolve around government redundancy and ineffectiveness. This very argument is what keeps teh 24/7 news networks afloat. Again, no surprise. No shock.
If you want to keep throwing up Iraq as being a bigger tragedy than 9/11 feel free. It's your political football. But that's all it is. A political football.
But if you want to be intellectually honest about it and take these issues at face value, none of them compares to the sheer impact of 9/11.
Least I got a chance to finish my Scotch before you replied.
I'm not going to continue writing in this thread after this post, you have your beliefs and you're entitled to them. I will say this:
9/11 brought out the best in Americans. The attacks of that Tuesday morning were terrible and awful, but the conspirators are well-known and the immediate response was (mostly) appropriate and (mostly) efficient.
The Iraq War was a deliberate choice on the part of this administration to divert efforts from hunting down the remnants of the Taliban and rebuilding Afghani society to taking down a benign (albeit vicious and problematic) dictator, using faulty (and that is a generous term) intelligence and histrionic jingoism to drive the American public to war. As a result, we have nearly 1,900 dead American soldiers, over 12,000 wounded. That is chilling, to me, and as tragic as 9/11. However, the focus of this thread is not Iraq, and I'd rather not dwell on it.
The glimpse into the American psyche that we've seen with NOLA is one of greed, entitlement, and laziness. People so dependent upon handouts, people so helplessly inured to the welfare state that they see nothing wrong with people completely unwilling to help themselves survive. People so greedy for free goods that they've looted and stolen their way throughout the city. People who've actively obstructed relief efforts, who have fired upon rescue helicopters.
It's disgusting.
I am not attempting to equate the three events, nor am I denying that 9/11 was a powerful, emotional, terrible event. But I think that the WTC had long been considered a target by terrorists, and that the ineptitude of the American bureaucracy contributed directly to the tragedy of 9/11.
All three events will have consequences, but I think that the Iraq war will have the most powerful, most long-lasting consequences. I have no doubt that my children and their children will be dealing with the consequences of the Iraq War.
I'm tired, and I've had a long day. Feel free to reply, but I won't read it. Let's leave this thread to its original purpose.
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