Comes Down to Culture

It's never too late to blame the victims of Katrina.

McQ, at QandO:

Now comes Iowa. Flooded across a much larger area, and just as devastating to those flooded out, not a bit of whining, crying, blame or finger-pointing seems to be going on.

As Lucianne.com subtitled a featured article about the flood, "no looting, no shooting, no one blaming Bush". Huh.

[...]

How refreshing. People actually doing for themselves and not waiting on someone else to do it for them. I'm sure the foreign press is disappointed it's unable to document the floods as the latest chapter in America's decline.

Now I've seen the complaints that these floods aren't comparable to Katrina and that the devastation in the wake of Katrina was far greater than Iowa will probably suffer. Well that's easy to say sitting high and dry in your home a few hundred or thousand miles away - but for those Iowans who have lost everything, I'd bet they'd disagree.

And I'd also point out that where Katrina actually made landfall - Mississippi - and literally scrubbed towns off the face of the earth, the recovery was much swifter (and the drama considerably less) than in New Orleans.

Nope, I think it comes down to culture. And no I'm not using "culture" as a code word for "race". It has to do with a culture of dependency, which, frankly, doesn't care what color you are. The culture in Iowa (just like Mississippi during Katrina) doesn't lend itself to the pitiful pictures and stories that came out of New Orleans.

Awful.