I mostly like the Charlotte Observer, despite their ongoing blatant pandering to the religious social conservative audience. But this smug little "it can't happen here"
editorial from yesterday really got my goat.
Charlotte is everything that New Orleans is not. If Charlotte is anything, it's efficient, clean, orderly and proper. If New Orleans is anything, it's inefficient, dirty, disorderly and decidedly improper. Where Charlotte is buttoned up, the Big Easy is gone wild. Where Charlotte works hard and is reverential, New Orleans is carefree and endlessly irresponsible. As we welcome our new guests into town, each city could learn a bit from the other.
The man's clearly smoking something good, and I wonder where he's getting it, as Charlotte is SO buttoned up and proper.
Would the civic and government response have been different in Charlotte? Some insist no, that we would have been overwhelmed, that the same underbelly of poverty would have been exposed. Here's my take: Charlotte would have responded differently because the culture here is different. Our decades of history tell a story of work ethic, cooperation and skilled leadership. We're not perfect, but we generally get it right.We're a Southern city on the move with national ambitions. As a result, every debate comes down to one decision: Will it bring us closer to a more progressive and liberal world-class ideal without sacrificing the more conservative moral and fiscal quality of life that has made Charlotte what it is?
Urk. "We have a work ethic, they don't." Damned shiftless New Orleans people! Never mind that many of those poorer people are the ones who bust their asses at minimum wage to make your tourist experience nice. And never mind that we have an equally huge number of people busting their asses at minimum wage in Charlotte so that members of the "conservative fiscal and moral class" can have elegant business lunches in uptown.
I suspect, with reason, that Mr. Peres lives in one of the parts of town where it's easy to believe that everyone in Charlotte is extremely well off, and that he never wonders where the cashiers at the organic food store go home to at night, when they go home.
There was so much wrong with the editorial that I didn't know where to start with my letter to the editor. So, here is my proud effort at a dispatch from the Reality-Based Community:
So Mark Peres thinks that Charlotte would escape the kind of human tragedy that occurred in New Orleans after the Katrina disaster? Where was Mr. Peres on Labor Day weekend, when it was every man for himself at the gas pump as everyone rushed to get theirs after the mere rumor of shortages?
Would Charlotte residents file out of the city in an orderly fashion in the event of an accident at one of the area's nuclear power plants, for instance? Would each family stop on their way out of town to pick up a couple of the city's poorer residents, who might not have a place to go or a way to get there?
Or would we all rush to the highways in our individual SUVs, creating a traffic jam miles long as we tried to get out first, trapping people who were slower off the mark (or unlucky enough not to have a car) in the middle of town?
It's unrealistic not to plan for the darker side of human nature when we prepare for disasters. I'm sure there were plenty of people in New Orleans who would never have believed that the city would leave its most helpless citizens behind in path of a hurricane. Turned out they were wrong.