Spike Lee is hangin’ at his joint in Martha’s Vineyard and attending a symposium dedicated to screening his one-sided “documentary” about Hurricane Katrina. Also attending are such self-described scholars as Harvard law professors Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., so you can bet the Bush and Republican-bashing has begun in earnest. 

The entire purpose of this victim-fete is, of course, to place a racial and political spin on the Hurricane Katrina disaster in order to indict most of America (at least those blue-staters) with the charge of bigotry.
“Would that George Bush and Dick Cheney be forced to watch this extraordinarily moving film,” said Harvard professor, and race-monger extraordinaire, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Apparently concerned that his point wasn’t completely clear, he added, “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if this happened in Martha’s Vineyard, their response would have been completely different.”

While this group munches on hors d’ouevres, sips champagne and nods approvingly at each other, lets keep it real for a moment and tell it like it is. I do agree that if a Hurricane Katrina-like disaster had hit Martha’s Vineyard the result would have been completely different. That’s because the folks living in Martha’s Vineyard, or Oklahoma City, or Houston (or in most other places in America that haven’t become a welfare state-in-a-state) are not so pathologically dysfunctional so as to be unable to care for themselves or to make basic decisions in self-preservation. Most of the residents of New Orleans are victims…of themselves abetted by the government enablers who do not expect, nor receive, anything from them remotely resembling what most of the rest of us consider part of the social compact.

When you have an enclave of non-working, welfare receiving, non-intact families headed by uneducated and unskilled single moms, what do you expect? When nothing is expected from these people other than to wake up and go to the mailbox to see if the next government assistance check has arrived, should anyone be surprised that they are singularly unable to care for themselves? Now, of course, not everyone living in New Orleans fits this description, but a significant majority do and certainly most who could find no way to leave the city or, if they could, stayed behind because they had no family of friends to go to.
Am I being too harsh? Well, not if you pay attention to what is happening in Houston, a city which opened its arms to an unprecedented extent to Katrina victims. A year later, Houston has had enough of the displaced citizens of New Orleans it had reached out to help, but not because of any additional burden placed on its social service system. Houston is fed up because of how these people conduct themselves.

Instead of being grateful to the City of Houston for its largesse, they have responded by increasing the violent crime rate by 5.8% (74 murders last year involved displaced Louisianans) and, despite being one year removed from the disaster, remaining mostly jobless and in subsidized housing. This is not to mention the apparent large numbers who trashed their rent-free housing before moving on.

People don’t act this way simply because they are poor or lack job skills. They act this way because of a deeply entrenched pathology of entitlement that has in fact been nurtured and allowed to take root by people like Spike Lee and his buddies in Martha’s Vineyard.

[This article also appears at Release The Hounds!]