Maybe Winter's Not So Bad After All. The "Frost Belt" has been losing population (and political power) steadily to the "Sun Belt" for decades. Perhaps recent hurricane evacuations and devastations will slow that trend, if not reverse it.
+
The Nation may see a stark reduction in the size of a major city due, basically, to warm weather. New Orleans has an unhealthy history and precarious location, having been the site of many yellow-fever epidemics and floods. The New Orleans Public Library states:

More than 41,000 people died from the scourge of yellow fever in New Orleans between the years 1817 (the first year that reliable statistics are available; surely there were deaths in earlier times) and 1905 (the Crescent City's last epidemic).

Popular Science magazine picks up the story there:

"So people decided to drain the swamps," says Al Naomi, senior project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans. With the levees in place and the swamps pumped dry, the city could now spread into areas that were once uninhabitable. "But when you take the water out of the swampy soils," he continues, "they start sinking."

Today, parts of New Orleans lie up to 20 feet below sea level, and the city is sinking at a rate of about nine millimeters a year.

The levees, you see, kept the Mississippi from replenishing the land with regular floods that used to deposit soil onto the marshes. That natural replenishment can no longer occur, so New Orleans keeps sinking ever farther below sea level. Meanwhile, the oceans are apparently rising at a rate of about 1.8mm a year — a trivial amount, but consequential over time for areas that are already sinking and subject to regular inundation by hurricane rains and storm surges.
+
Plainly, the areas of New Orleans presently or soon to be below sea level should not be rebuilt. Instead, marshes should be restored there and the river allowed to resume deposition of soil in the natural process that people disrupted, which disruption has produced the recent calamity.
+
Still, the people formerly resident in New Orleans have to be housed somewhere, and many are expected never to return to their old neighborhood, nor even to that city more generally. That's all to the good. Let those who have jobs return. Let those who were unemployable in New Orleans be scattered to where there is work, or rehabilitation, for them.
+
Re-employment is a largely private responsibility. Retraining, psychological counseling, workforce development (instilling good work habits, getting people the substance-abuse treatment programs and job training they need, etc.) is a largely govenmental responsibility.
+
Tens of millions of Americans have contributed to private programs of aid to victims of hurricane Katrina, and some of the money still being raised will as well go to people displaced by Rita. Among the donors are gay people.
+
I was in a Greenwich Village gay men's bar last nite and saw flyers posted on the walls to draw attention to the fact that management was collecting money for hurricane victims via a canister on the bar and would match whatever was deposited in the canister. I don't know that that is at all wise.
+
Today a friend sent me the URL of the Rainbow World Fund, an "LGBT" charity that is also collecting money for Katrina victims.

We are a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and supportive heterosexual humanitarian service agency. Rainbow World Fund’s mission is to promote LGBT philanthropy in the area of world humanitarian relief. RWF provides a united voice, a large visible presence, and a structure to deliver LGBT charitable assistance to the larger world community.

Since when are gay people so rich as to be able to give money to straights? Our own organizations, community centers, drug-treatment programs, etc., are grossly underfunded, and there are few to no services to help maladjusted gay men accept their nature and overcome gender confusion and temptations to drown their sorrows in booze or avoid dealing with their problems by staying zonked out on drugs.
+
So why are gay men giving money to rednecks in Mississippi? Will their enemies be grateful for the assistance, or be offended that "faggots", "dykes", and "drag queens" are trying to make them change their attitudes by sending them money, in effect trying to buy off the disapproval that characterizes the Red States? Maybe these rightwingers will be too proud to accept such a 'bribe'.
+
Let the Red States fend for themselves and rely upon the rightwing Republicans they put in charge of the Nation. Let them find out if "their own people" care for them — or only for their votes.
+
I won't send a cent to Mississippi, Alabama, or Texas. Blue States should not rescue Red States from their own stupidity. If the Republican Right does not tend expeditiously to their own constituency, let the people ignored and neglected by their supposed champions realize that the Republican rich don't give a damn about poor white trash any more than they care about Southern blacks. Then let them change their voting patterns, starting with next year's midterm congressional elections.
+
If, however, they can't get justice from "their own people" in the rightwing South, maybe they will have the good sense to leave the South and find that the weather of the North may be cold, but the caring politics of the North matter a lot more.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,914.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:58 PM