Why does much of New Orleans still look as if the 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina had occurred just a few weeks ago?
Huge areas of New Orleans still are wastelands. New Orleans’s liberal-progressive-socialist Senator Mary Landrieu has grabbed far more than her share of Congressional pork. Hundreds of millions of Federal dollars spent for rehabilitation have produced far too little beneficial result. People were without electric power for months; the police department contained more thieves than honest law enforcers; drug-dealing and prostitution remain major enterprises; and the city still retains its crown as the nation’s murder capital. One of the city’s few “legitimate” businesses is casino gambling.
City and state administrations have yet to coordinate rebuilding plans, as politicians fight over who gets what share of the spoils. The best that the city’s Mayor Nagin can do is to demand that the Democratic-socialist Party presidential candidates pledge to send even more pork to New Orleans.
What accounts for this dismal record?
The answer is simple. New Orleans abandoned God and personal moral responsibility, turning instead to worshipping the atheistic, secular political state. That secular god has failed miserably, notoriously so in the aftermath of Katrina.
Today, rebuilding devastated poor areas of the city is the work largely of church groups from elsewhere in the nation who send missionary construction teams. Ultimately this may make for a better city in which people learn to help each other and to look to their own individual efforts and to Christian love for succor, rather than to the welfare-state god.
The Lord God, our Creator, is putting the god of socialism to shame.
Having been the largest and wealthiest city in the South after World War I, New Orleans after the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 stopped being fruitful and multiplying (Genesis 9:7). Sugar plantations and other sources of economic activity surrounding the city were devastated, as they were three years ago by Hurricane Katrina. The city’s ruling social clique settled into a self-centered, sensual social life.
Unhappily for New Orleans, Huey Long became Louisiana’s governor in 1928 and began building one of the nation’s first, full-bore, socialistic welfare systems. Franklin Roosevelt became President five years later, nationalizing and expanding the welfare state. Since then, generations of New Orleanians have made a career of living on welfare. Poorly educated blacks, who comprised a large percentage of the population, remained poor and uneducated.
Instead of the American heritage of individual responsibility and moral probity, the city’s large welfare population was taught to sit at home and wait for the welfare-state dole.
While Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Mobile, and Memphis grew and prospered after World War II, New Orleans remained essentially stagnant. The old-time social leaders, who also controlled politics and the press, were content to let New Orleans deteriorate into the “city that care forgot,” while singing “laissez-rouler les bons temps.” Apart from the brief few years in the 1980s of off-shore drilling activity headquartered in the city, the city has steadily lost more business than it retained.
Since 1978, the city has had only black mayors, and blacks have controlled nearly all of the city’s major political offices. One might have expected them to do something constructive for the city’s poor blacks, such as cutting the crime rate, stopping the drug rackets, and improving education. Instead, black leaders followed the precedent of the erstwhile white ruling class. They adopted the old Louisiana conception of political reform: turn out the fat hogs and let in the lean ones. Black leaders became just as centered upon getting rich and powerful at the expense of the public treasury as had been their white predecessors.
Unfortunately, black church leaders are excluded from the halls of power in the secular welfare state.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
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A New Orleans and Louisiana Blog About Politics, Culture, Arts, Lifestlyes and Recovery. said,
April 23, 2008 at 2:51 pm
lieweary said,
As for the public benefits situation, you could improve things by providing economic incentives to stay married instead of encouraging divorce and single parenthood.
April 23, 2008 at 3:53 pm
shatteredmen said,
The answer is simple. New Orleans abandoned God and personal moral responsibility
I can not agree more. Just as Nero “fiddled” while Rome burned (and blamed the Christians for it), the political leaders of N.O. were asleep as Katrina roared in. Money that was intended for upgrading levees was spent to upgrade roads to casinos
Much of the recent history of this once great city was based upon what the Bible calls sin. There is always a cost for sin and it always cost more then we can afford and it always cost others then the one doing it….and this cost is always hidden from us before we do it.
http://www.shatterdmen.com/HIDDEN%20COST.htm
April 23, 2008 at 11:02 pm
conservativation said,
While in no way belittling jazz, I am not the least bit interested in the Feds “supporting” the arts in any way, including rebuilding because of an art form.
We may have once been in a position to do such things. Had we not done them we’d be far better off today.
Like any form of art, if those who love jazz are so driven to rebuild its birthplace, let the market decide. If enough people are not willing to support an art form, whatever type, then in a capitalist system it withers and is replaced by something they do support.
The best thing the government can do, for art, for medicine, and business, is simple…..get the hell out of the way.
April 24, 2008 at 7:49 am
bronskrat said,
And to conservativation who doesn’t see the arts as worthy of the Feds to support, I posit this: wasn’t it the government who decided it wasn’t worth it to repair/improve the levees in New Orleans to begin with?
It’s been known for a long time that the levees were in poor shape (well documented in the Times-Picayune). A lack of moral center didn’t kill New Orleans, a corrupted and misguided government did. And while I agree with the article’s author on that point, I disagree with the need for church leaders in government. What makes them more educated about the needs of the state? Oh right, their economic expertise in managing funds to improve their respective churches which would get redirected to the populous once elected. Oh please.
April 24, 2008 at 8:19 am
lieweary said,
April 24, 2008 at 6:32 pm
504crank said,
April 25, 2008 at 12:27 pm
RockyMountainMan said,
April 26, 2008 at 3:19 pm