In today's New York Times, there's a very rational story, fairly bursting with newsiness (my term for traditional media "truthiness") about the problems in New Orleans, a little article by Adam Nossiter entitled New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size.
And it turns out that this article is the fourth most popular New York Times article emailed today. Hooray for newsiness!
Well I have had it with the New York Times and the traditional media and all their newsiness.
Nossiter writes that even before Katrina there were problems in New Orleans, both in the economy and in terms of losing population:
In this view, the storm was merely a grim exclamation point to conditions decades in the making. Before the storm, some economists say, New Orleans may have had more people than its economy could support, and the stalled repopulation is merely reflecting that.
Yep, that's right. There was a declining population even before Katrina:
Hurricane Katrina may have brutally recalibrated the city’s demographics, setting New Orleans firmly on the path its underlying characteristics had already been leading it down: a city losing people at the rate of perhaps 1.5 percent a year before Hurricane Katrina, with a stagnant economy, more than a quarter of the population living in poverty, and a staggeringly high rate of unemployment, in which as many as one in five were jobless or not seeking work.
Yes, I'd say "brutally recalibrated" is a good term to describe what happened in NOLA.
And what about those jobless folks? Those awful poor people who are such a drain on our society -- after all, Faux News said so!
The statistics, which compare the number of people actually working with the total working-age population, suggest "there are a lot of people out there not working," said Mr. Oakland, referring to the period before Hurricane Katrina. Or, he said, they were working in an underground economy, not measured by statistics. If not actually illegal, he said, it was not very profitable.
Yep, a lot of people out there not working, yep. Of course some of them may be working in an "underground economy," sounds scary, doesn't it? But most, just not working. Definitely an unsolvable problem.
The gist of the article is that many of the poor folks who left New Orleans are probably better off in other areas with a more vibrant economy. And after all, things weren't going so well before Katrina. So why be surprised? The article pretty much says New Orleans will end up with only half the population it had, and perhaps that's a good thing, as one retired economist claims:
"Where there are high concentrations of poverty, people can’t see a way out," said William Oakland, a retired economist from Tulane University who has studied the city’s economy for decades. "Maybe the diaspora is a blessing."
What have we come to? A blessing? A blessing to just allow this situation to continue in the way it has? We have no will, no ability to change this? Poverty is just a fact of life, there's no solutions to it, urban empowerment zones, jobs programs, tax relief, economic equity, school programs, are all just silly fairy tales from those long ago days when Americans actually believed we could solve problems, not just bemoan them?
And this is the newsiness we are supposed to accept, just go "oh well, that's some bad stuff, poor New Orleans, but after all, it was happening even before Katrina, so I guess this was inevitable." A blessing in disguise? To me, that is an obscene view of what is happening in New Orleans. And, frankly, in so many cities as well as rural areas in America.
This Administration has done a great deal of damage, to our Constitution, to our armed services, to the world. But I truly believe one of the most damaging things it has done is to make Americans feel this sense of fatalism, that nothing can be done, problems can't be solved, we should all look away and give up. It's obscene. It is un-American. And it is wrong.
I'm sick of newsiness. And I'm sick of a traditional media who can put out crap like this and not see the damage it does to a wonderful city whose morale is already dangerously low.