Guns don't kill people, I kill people.

Quote:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------That disaster did not cause looting, people caused looting.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And guns don't kill people, people kill people, according to some. But guns have bullets. And while those bullets are not responsible for the trigger, they do cause the injury sustained. So why is it that we don't throw people in jail and through the miraculous healing of justice someone is in turn completely cured when the guilty party is prosecuted? Because fundamentally we still have to repair the damage the gun and its fodder, the bullets, have caused. The violence could come from another direction and still has a primary (or secondary, depending on your choice of prima facie investigation) source, but we're still talking, simple and plain, a gunshot wound. Not to say that the gun is the primary cause, but A cause (one of many, in fact.) Its level is not the same as the person's culpability, but definitely holds true to form as a contributor to injury.
Your analogy then only holds so much weight with the disaster argument. Both indeed are causes, but to say that they are not dependant on one another is like saying that cholesterol didn't contribute to a man's heart attack or that pollen doesn't make me sneeze. The truth lies in that the causes are neither independant nor weighted. They're BOTH part of the same conclusion: poor people who were already struggling to begin with ultimately losing all assets and becoming overtly destitute in a concentrated, polluted area. Which leads to another statement made:

Quote:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------I beat my wife, the devil made me do it, I rape your sister, the disaster made me do it. Sorry, I do not buy the bleading heart liberal montra at all. Everything I have done in my life, good and bad, are because of CHOICES I have made. None of my choices were the results of a disaster, the devil, society. I made the choices, and those who looted made the choices. No one FORCED them to loot. They were not at the point of starvation, they were being challenged for the first time in many of their lives, challenged to be human beings, they were challenged to actually TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A blanket characterization appears here that is troubling. The they in this argument has been molded out of a disturbing model: the welfare queen and/or drug dealer and/or pimp and/or king of the block. To save myself some time, I'm going to repost something that I put up earlier. I think it relates better to our conversation and its something I wish to reference later on.
The human body's systems are dependant on multiple chemicals, nutrients, and solvents to make it function. These vital fluids are determined by the brain to be necessary for survival unless told otherwise. Our bodies, not unlike car engines, run slower and operate at a diminished capacity when unable to find sufficient fuel.

So when people riot, doctors are never called to report on the situation. Why? Because doctors would say that the desire to loot, to find food or water, or whatever the media is calling it is COMPLETELY NATURAL. The human body does anything it can to ensure its own survival. That's why people are known to flee with an almost supernatural sense of eminent danger, exhibit feats of strength that they previously have never shown prior to the extraordinary event, and in times of strife tend to go a little crazy.

In New Orleans, there are five plants that are part of a union I worked for some months ago. Those plants printed all sorts of magazines and newspapers and used a chemical called toluene as a solvent. This chemical is a carcinogen and a level four risk as a hazardous material. It is volatile, so much so that if you filled a coke bottle with it and shook it for a good one or two minutes, you would probably be covered in flames or fatally burned from the blast. In an emergency, MTs of five are called to turn off the pumps, evacuate the facility, and decide who is going to remain because if there's a breach as much as square mile could be incinerated by the amounts in most printing facilities of medium size.

All of the plants I know of were affected by the disaster. And this toluene is now in the water all over town. It is also on fire, and residents have reported coughing and contamination-related symptoms. Now, going back to our previous analogies, this isn't a simple "toluene made people crazy" suggestion. This problem is one of many contamination problems that are now a serious ecological threat. But the contamination also adds to the myriad of reasons why a group of poor people would decide to lash out at aid workers and soldiers trying to save their lives: the events have driven people mad. The overarching conclusion and truth has to be this then:
The current survivors of the disaster are screwed up by the unfolding events. They are probably not going to be well for a long time, and before they were unhinged in this way they were poor and that ALONE can make you crazy if it is the level of poverty that is known of in Ward 9. We're now reaping the benefits of being a society with wealth in that we're alive, but we're experiencing the inverse of that when poor people get angry: our wealth and pleasure penultimately contributed to their hungry and thirsty madness. And we're fundamentally screwed if we don't address it in a healthy way.

The poor people that you describe as animals are typically people who work blue-collar jobs. Plants in NOLA actually have great attendance records, make award winning products, and generally have employees who work hard. There are also people who work in stores like Wal-Mart, KMart, Piggly Wiggly, etc. All of these people in these places make much less than your average white-collar person and live in an area that takes economic advantage of that. As a result, people live paycheck to paycheck.

There are definitely people who take advantage of the system, but they are fundamentally few and far between. We see more of them because it is much "sexier", but being a person who has to compile the statistics out of the field and then go into the worst neighborhoods in the United States to try and help these people, I must fundmentally disagree with the idea that they are animals in search of a handout or a victim. For the most part, they don't have the money to move and are terrified that they will lose all the headway they have made against their own economic situation. Add to that a chemically induced high from the air and water full of toxins and a desire to get some nourishment, and you'll get a lot of angry broke people with nothing left to lose.

gotta break the post here... will continue addressing your letter soon.... feel free to address what I've written so far...