Looting from a very different perspective [View All]

[blondeatlast]

Sorry to bring this issue up again, but as a municipal employee this occurred to me at work today.

While we are going round and round about this at DU, we fail to ever blame the elephant in the room; the big, stinking elephant.

That being drastically slashed federal and state funds to cities and the resultant absolute necessity to slash municipal budgets. I've been a victim of this myself and I've seen the effect in public libraries after a disaster, so I have a better than average idea of what can happen on a very, very grand scale.

Why are we so quick to accept that there aren't enough first responders in any disaster to cover the inevitable fallout?

Things happen, and the best staffed police and fire would have been in a jam over Katrina. But they would have been far more able to cope with the looting; able to put cops on the street SOONER (sooner is crucial to containing it) in order to control as much of it as possible.

I don't care what your feelings are about the looters and what they might be looting. I do care that while we quibble among each other and say horribly hateful things, one of the most major issues is completely ignored--and it is something we have a degree of control over.

While we argue over the morality of the situation, desperate people on both sides of the issue are, well, doing desperate things--and the real issue at the heart of the matter goes very largely ignored.

And that's not even mentioning the fact that the National Guards of the affected states are largely unavailable due ot an illegal, immoral war...