Lessons From Katrina Exposes Liberal Fallacies.

Reprinted from Oblogatory Anecdotes ​

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3717/1296/1600/eagle2.gif"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3717/1296/320/eagle1.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >
</span><div style="text-align: justify;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The events in New orleans last week reminded me of an incident a few years ago. There was a restaurant in a mountain resort that kept an eagle in a cage for many years. Patrons would feed the majestic bird, but were left with a feeling that it was wrong to keep the magnificent eagle confined to a cage where it was unable to fly free in the wild.
</span></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >
Many called for the restaurant to free the bird and allow it to fly in the open skies the way nature intended. When pressure mounted, the owners relented and decided the people were right and agreed to free the bird.

The day came to set if free. The story of the eagle had became a local interest story, and the news media along with representatives of various animal welfare groups were present to witness the emancipation of the great eagle.

The cage was opened and the crowd cheered expecting the eagle to immediately breath the sweet air of freedom and soar towards the heavens to meet it’s destiny.

To their shock the eagle happily stood in it's cage without budging. Not wanting to hurt the bird they did not try and force it. Surely the bird would leave once it understood it was free to go, or perhaps it was spooked by the crowd?

Several days passed and the eagle remained with no interest in leaving the cage it had called home for years. It was then decided that the bird must be forced out of the cage and brought far into the mountains to be freed. They were sure the bird would respond and adapt to it's new surroundings.

They took the eagle to an area several miles away where many eagles were known to frequent. When they set the eagle free it flew away and into the open sky for the first time in many years.

Before the eagle was freed it was tagged in order to track its whereabouts. There was great interest in the scientific community to see how the eagle would react to its new circumstance.

After the bird won its freedom it was tracked for a few days. Then suddenly the signal stopped in place and no movement could be detected. Using GPS the bird was discovered dead only a couple of miles from the restaurant were it had lived for so many years. An autopsy was performed and it was determined that the bird had starved to death. There was plenty of food around that the eagle could have gotten, but It had lost the ability to take care of itself, having been kept and fed at the in the cage for so long.

When hurricane Katrina ripped through the levee walls and exposed the city of New Orleans to a deluge of water from the Mississippi, and lake Pontchartrain. Likewise it also ripped through the heart of liberalism and exposed its fallacies with deadly results.

The greatest lesson learned is that government cannot save everyone. To rely on government is to put your faith in a false God that will lead you to destruction. Many sat in their own filth and even died waiting for the government to deliver them. Those who did should not be blamed for they were merely following what has been conditioned in them by generations of liberal indoctrination. They were lied too, deceived, and Beguiled by promises that government would always be there for them. In the end however their liberal teachings had only weakend them to the point where they were stripped of the most basic instinct for self preservation and rendered incapable of any personal initiative.


Please read this excellent article form <a href="http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026"><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Intellectual Activist</span></a> titled "</span><span style=";font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:78%;" ><span style=";font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:100%;" class="articletitleheader" ><b>An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State</b>" </span><span style=";font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:100%;" class="articleauthor" >by Robert Tracinski </span>
</span></div>

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Brutus, that is so dippy it had to come from a neo-con.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Brutus:

Are you suggesting that every person who stayed in New Orleans is a victim of liberalism? You mean it wasn't abject poverty or broken levees that made them vulnerable?

 

worst analogy ever.

 

Worse than just a bad analogy. Your post suggests that the overwhelmingly black, marginalized class that suffered the most in New Orleans are the victims of government largesse. The last paragraph uses language reminiscent of apocalyptic teaching - equating government and liberalism with the antichrist (am I correct in reading between the lines?) and suggesting that helping our brothers and sisters in need is breeding a generation of complacent, lazy and weak people. Is this what your post is about?

Why don't you just skip the parable and just go ahead and say what's on your mind, Brutus? Then we can discuss it.

 

Well, every "emergency manual" I've ever seen has a blurb about storing enough emergency food and water and other neccesities for your family for a period of 3 to 5 days. Apparently few in New Orleans did that. But if they had, they'd have been in much better shape. They had plenty of time to do it and didn't.

They were ordered to evacuate and they didn't. Sure, we can make excuses, but are they really valid?

Our government has guanranteed our freedom, but apparently we don't want it! We want the government to do everything for us ......and THAT is not freedom. Being totally dependent on someone else/some government officials is LESS than freedom.

Baron Max

 

Some things are beyond our own control. And what do you mean total dependence/independence?

Should the victims of 911 buy their own parachute? Gas mask?

An interesting fact is that some marines in Iraq have to buy their own bullet-proof jackets.

 

And the more things that ARE beyond our control is the more we're NOT free! The more we depend on others, the less we depend on ourselves and the less free we really are.

I don't disagree that our society has "forced" us to be dependent ...that is a fact of our society. But at some point, like keeping emergency supplies, is just one more way for us to be free of the dictates of that society. And to survive a disaster like Katrina!!

As I see it, we've become so dependent on our government that we've lost the ability to care for ourselves. Ralph Waldo Emerson would have been appalled and disappointed.

A good case in point!! If the government couldn't/wouldn't provide the jackets, then they got them on their own! And I sent many myself!! Good point and good analogy ....good for those marines!!

Baron Max

 

Thank you, Baron Max for understanding my point. My post is not directed at the government or even the victims of hurricane Katrina. They are only examples. It is dependence that is the killer of the soul. Relying completely on others leads to poverty because you will only get enough from others for your very basic sustenance. Even a slave will fight to free himself, but someone totally dependent will obediently sit and wait for his masters orders. Dependence is a bond that is inescapable.

The reason I point the blame to liberalism is because every liberal policy points to, and encourages dependence.

 

Holy crap,

There is no way anyone in America can live as a wild eagle, we are almost all of us tame and well fed in our cages.

Secondly, this isn't a liberal government, it's neo-conservative and they failed the people perhaps because of this idea that everyone should be on their own. If anything, Katrina ripped through this idea just like previous natural disasters did, notably other floods of the mississippi. What if your horded food and water got washed away, or was underwater, or contaminated (theoretically) by radiation? What if you are old, or an orphan, or have other severe health problems? It makes sense to have a coordinated effort to help people. Government is an organization of citizens, gathered for no other reason than to promote the well being of the nation. If they can't do this, they are not earning their pay.

It was the government that PREVENTED people from leaving the superdome and convention centers. Did you know that? I guess they should have known King George wouldn't save them from shit.

 

Well, then we should all be just happy as pigs in shit, huh? So why is everyone who's still alive and kicking complaining so hard??

And what were those "citizens" doing not obeying the orders of that "organization of citizens"? Were they all gathered in a "coordinated effort to help" their neighbors and friends? Or did they expect some citizens from, say, Oregon to come down and help them????

The citizen's who remained in NO after the evacuation orders were given were at fault for their own suffering. That others came in to help them was a miracle in itself!

Now excuse me, but I have to get back into my happy little cage now.

Baron Max

 

I would have stored enough food and water. I would have cleaned my bath tub and filled it with water. The problem is that everything I stored would have been under dirty salt water after the flood. Yes the people should have known to store their supplys in their attics but then the government should have known that New Orleans Levee upgrades were a higher priority than Billions of dollars of routine pork barrel (semi-fraud) spending.

The eagle story is a good story but it does not sound like a true story. Animal lovers know better than to release a tame animal into the wild.

The analogy only works if your saying the eagle was at fault for depending on it's owners. Blaming the captive eagle for not knowing how to feed itself sounds like something conservatives would do.

Depending on the government is like asking for trouble and this is especially true when the government is run by Bush appointees.

 

Brutus:

I understand your point, now, too. It is all too easy to misunderstand people when they use somebody else's parable to express themselves.

I agree with you that dependence can put people in a horribly vulnerable position, and that long-term dependence can stunt initiative and leave people to cry for help at the drop of a hat. We might even agree that in some cases it is best to let people suffer a little bit to teach them that overdependence is not a good thing.

Where I would like to disagree is your characterization of liberalism as the source of dependency in this culture. Are we talking about the notion that the government has a role to play in taking care of people's needs when they cannot provide those needs for themselves? If so, then I have two specific questions to present for your consideration.

First, do you think that the government (and by government I mean any governmental entity from the local town board to the federal big boys) should not interfere with any corporation, industry, economic interest or market? Specifically should there be no bailout of airlines, no tariffs on foreign steel, no subsidization of U.S. agriculture, nothing that would upset a truly free market?

Second, do you advocate the ending of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or any other state aid system that provides any sort of handout to private citizens?

If your answer to the first question is yes, then you'd better enlarge your notion of "dependency" and consider whether "liberals" are the source of corporate dependency. Seems to me that most if not all of the corporate welfare advocated by the state comes from the Republican side of the aisle. Sure as hell seems like governmental handouts to industries and corporations stunt initiative and create weakness in the economy, right?

If your answer to the second question is yes, then I hope you don't need any kind of extended nursing care any time soon. Because if you do, then I'd say you should have thought of that when you were eighteen years old - you would have had fifty years to save your money to prepare for it. But maybe you are wealthy and don't need to worry about that. Maybe we'd better just wheel all the old folks out in the snow right now, because it's not the government's business to help them out. We don't want grandma getting too dependent on the government handout, right? We've got to be heartless bastards about it to teach the young not to expect anything later on.

 

Because their cage has washed away. We no longer grow our own food individually, so we depend on an infrastructure to deliver our needs. The water from natural sources isn't clean. It is a fantasy to think everyone is on their own and totally self sufficient.

Many had no transportation. They ordered somthing that was impossible for many to obey.

Many did and are gathering to help neighbors and friends. Citizens from Oregon are coming to help.

Then why does Bush call the relief effort "unacceptable"? Is it the elderly grandmother's fault that she couldn't drive out without a car? Or perhaps the baby who's parents drowned is at fault for depending on adults? You are a sickening human being.

 

Exactly.
I guess we didn't need the gub'ment to invade Afghanistan either.

Ah yes, I recognize the Republican talking point for the day:
BLAME THE WELFARE STATE

The real message from the cons is clear, leave us to use the collective power (allegedly) invested in us by the American people to persue our own business agendas, and don't expect a damn thing in return, also, leave us alone about any failures.

 

It's weird, you know, this type of thinking. It's like, the incompetance of the government proves that we shouldn't depend on it? It isn't the structure of government that makes it undependable, it's the people currently holding those positions.

What if the feds did a good job dealing with this crisis? Would that prove we do need them? Could their incompetence have been deliberate? ...to teach us a lesson?

Without the government, I'm sure you guys realize, we couldn't build and run cities in the first place.