Sep 9, 2005

Need Transportation? Send soldiers. Need a doctor? Send soldiers....

Why do they always respond with force? Do they not know or care about the root cause of anything? Is the solution to every grievance the lower classes have simply one of not enough police presence for them to realize that they should either shut up "or else"? Mycos Excerpts: An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of theboulevardboulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States. At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention CeSuperdomeSuperdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

2 comments:

Mycos said...

And how this situation developed speaks volumes about the minds of those who are currently in office. They respond to anything that rocks the world of the rich with force. You see it with drug abuse, poverty, hurricanes, terror attacks, etc. There appears to be little or no attempt to try to figure out the root cause of any civil disturbance, both domestic or foreign. Everything can, and will be "solved" with brute force.

Mycos

Anonymous said...

Indeed, such attempts are discouraged, and sometimes themselves met with
force. Recall that post-9.11, anyone who dared posit that the terrorists must
have had valid (to them) reasons for attacking us was branded as "one of them."