At least according to WaPo. Buffalo blizzard fuels racial and class fissures in polarized city - The Washington Post
Snow blankets an area known for snow, and the city in the middle of that area is not prepared. Who is to blame but the politicians running the city?
Let's just take one thing that really bothers me when something like this comes up. Preparation.
“People in this area are nurses, firefighters, blue-collar folks that live paycheck to paycheck,” Robinson said. “To say that they should get two weeks of groceries is an impossible request for many.”
No one said they should have gone out on Monday and purchased 2 weeks worth of groceries. Let's consider 1 thing, rice.
My local Kroger sells 32 ounces of their house brand, long-grain rice for $1.50, while the five pound bag of the same rice is $3.79, and the ten pound bag is $6.99. Rice, if you store it so the bugs and mice can't get to it - I put it in mason jars, and buy significantly more than 10 pounds at time - lasts a long time. The same is true of dried beans, though I usually buy canned black beans or red beans or refried beans. They also last a while - not decades - and are healthy. What's that you say? You don't like black beans and rice? Then by all means, feel free to starve to death in the cold.
I want to insert the old fable of the ant and the grasshopper, but the Left has already denounced that as evil, because the ant should have shared with the grasshopper, never mind that the grasshopper didn't prepare.
You shouldn't wait for an impending emergency to be announced to stock emergency supplies, because while you might get some warning for a blizzard, there are plenty of emergencies that will give you no warning. But that isn't how the people who huddle in cities think. They expect to be taken care of if anything out of the ordinary happens. Some of them expect to be taken care of all the time.
Can everyone do this? No. But if everyone who can spend a little bit preparing every week for the next year, would do so, when the NEXT blizzard hits, the city will have fewer people in dire need. Self-reliance? I know, it is a very 19th Century idea. People in the 21st Century expect the .gov to do everything, even when they have proven time and again that the cannot do those things. And before you say, "They don't have the money" find out how many smoke, drink, have a smartphone, or Netflix or Disney+ or Amazon Prime or drink beer or ..., and then find out how much they spent on Christmas...
I can't even quote any more of the WaPo insanity. Instead I will quote Don Surber, who gets credit for calling my attention to this screed. Snow is racist.
This is not to make light of the plight of people in poor neighborhoods, or as Sacks put it "Black and Brown neighborhoods." No one wants to live in a ghetto. That's why we built suburbs. But racism was not the problem. Incompetence was. The response from City Hall and the governor's office left much to be desired. Buffalo last elected a Republican mayor to a four-year term in 1962.
The author of the original article is distressed to discover that the suburbs and the city have different plans for plowing. The city handles its own plowing, while suburbs rely on the county. Shocking Fact: the city is NOT well prepared. I wonder if they spend more money on plowing in the city and get less.
This isn't racism. Buffalo's city crews were not up to the task. The county's were. [Don Surber]
Now if the WaPo has such a problem with the people running Buffalo, you might think they would call them out. But the mayor of Buffalo, Byron Brown, is black and has been mayor since January 1, 2006. Who exactly should get all of the blame for this fiasco?
But of course according the WaPo, everything is racist. If the city of Buffalo is incompetent, it is because the county and the suburbs are racist. If the city can't plow snow, it is because the suburbs are racist. If the public housing owned and administered by the city is falling apart and has no heat, it is because someone outside of the city is raaaacist.
As Don Surber says, even the snow is racist.
I'm reminded of the song "Cancer" by Joe Jackson.. “There’s no cure, there’s no answer.” Except for singing about Cancer, he could be talking about the Left's view of Racism.
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
There’s no cure, there’s no answer
Everything gives you cancer
How could anyone predict that kind of a blizzard? It's not like this kind of thing has happened in Buffalo before.
ReplyDeleteI blame Global Warming
DeleteWhile everything that you say about rice and beans is true, you can also buy canned vegetables and meats fairly reasonably at such places as Walmart and Aldi. So dietary preferences are no excuse to not be minimally prepared.
DeleteI actually by from a company that serves the Amish. (Higher quality) Most of the stuff I find at WM or Kroger has gravy or too much salt or something.
DeleteWerling & Sons will sell me canned meat in broth, in sizes appropriate for one person. Yoders is similar, but the smallest size is only suitable for a family.
But yes, you can prepare in many ways if you have the budget. (The emergency packs of food you get from various sources - dehydrated mostly - are crazy expensive and often not great but last a couple of decades on the shelf.)
But the thing I was most responding to is "I can't afford it." Rice and beans are some of the cheapest food on the planet. Add in a bit of onions and hot sauce and I could survive for quite some time. And if my choice is rice-and-beans versus starvation, well that choice is easy to make.
And I've had those discussions. "I live paycheck to paycheck," many people have told me. Usually while we are both standing around drinking beer, sometimes while they were smoking. Once we were actually standing next to a satellite TV antenna. (That's about 100 or 120 bucks a month if you don't know.) But they can't find an extra 5 or 25 dollars a week in their budget. I gave up arguing with those people decades ago.
Again we have similar experiences, I home can and dehydrate my survival foods, but that requires equipment and dedication, and that's not who we are talking about. I too have given up on trying to convert the willfully stupid, unfortunately is things do go south we will have to deal with them in a less friendly way.
DeleteThere's an example I always think of. I live in SE Michigan and in the early 2000s the auto plant were running full tilt and with overtime, many factory rats were making around six figures. When the 2008 crash hit cabins up north, boats, trucks, ORVs, etc were suddenly available cheap because instead of putting anything away, these people spent every nickel and could not afford their lifestyle on a forty hour week.
In the nineties I was working in a hospital in Kalamazoo and a lady I got to know there asked me for financial advice because I was frugal and she was drowning in debt. So I started going over her finances for her and the first thing I noticed was she had a two year car lease. I asked her about it and she said she always did that when I suggested she buy out the lease at the end or get a used car. She informed me that she deserved that car, I decided that I couldn't help her.