Navigate This Post
The flooding in southeast Louisiana broke hundred year records. Tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated as flood waters rose over the tops of cars in some places. Innumerable families lost everything; cars, furniture, clothing, appliances…everything.
In all of it, where is the government that claims to care so much about “the people”. Why are the communities of Louisiana being ignored?
Our SWAT Fuel Warrior of the Week has a question about teaching young people to shoot and where to begin. Professor Paul has decades of experience teaching new shooters, young and old, and has a good bit to say on the subject.
Also, during our Motivational Moment for the Troops, Paul says “build a rocket.”
Brought to you by Silencer Shop!
Topics Covered During This Episode:
- Facebook is throttling organic posts, please share our content to help us defeat Facebook throttling
- Motivational Moment for Troops: Build a Rocket
- Warrior of the Week: Starting Kids With Guns: Shoot rimfire rifle
- The Flood of 2016: Southeast Louisiana and the Consequences of Real Community
- Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the myth the mainstream media spread
- PatriotFireTeam.com: 4 Families That Will Support Each Other when times are hard
Use Code “SOTG2015”
Shop Amazon.com
Meal Planning & Exercise Guide
Please visit www.SilencerShop.com and take a look at what they have in stock!
Get Your Student of the Gun Tattoo Here: www.lauerweaponry.com
From www.huffingtonpost.com:
My younger brother, who as I write this is on his way to Baton Rouge to help flood victims, and I spent the better part of this last week doing two things: monitoring Louisiana State University flood maps and exchanging irritated text messages at how little national media attention was being given to the devastation occurring in our home state.
Between August 12 and 14, four trillion gallons of rain fell, 11 river gauges in southeast Louisiana set all time record highs, 20,000 people had to be rescued, 10,000 people have been put in shelters, and a number of souls lost their lives.
In my hometown of Denham Springs, roughly 90 percent of the people living there have flood damage to their homes.
The flood is historic, tragic, and hard to conceptualize. Quiet little suburban towns that few people outside of Baton Rouge have ever even heard of became lakes of rainwater and debris almost in an instant.
Conversations went from what clothes children would wear on the first day of school, to what the basic items of survival were for a family with small children.
Through it all, media coverage was so lacking that people living outside of the immediate area resorted to social media sites to updates themselves on what was happening in the area; using uploaded videos, pictures, and posts to piece together events and timelines, the pathways of the moving water, and how long the crisis would last.
As cellular service failed, power went out across town after town, and families scrambled to find shelter, secure rescue, and just survive…news media coverage was virtually silent.
A number of very good articles have been written about why, mostly speaking on the fact that the flood did not fit the narrative of entertainment the news media requires in order to garner coverage.
The few articles that complain on the lack of national media coverage all have the same goal in mind… to get more media coverage on the event so that the scope of the tragedy can be known and help given to those people in need.
To accomplish this, they focus on the scope of the tragedy itself; as I resorted to earlier in this piece. In order to achieve the goal of coverage, those of us who care about the heartbreak in southeast Louisiana are forced to package it in those narrative frames of entertainment and historic loss in order to get anyone to care… and that to me is the larger tragedy.
The tragedy is that strong, loving, cohesive communities, because of their strength and resilience, cannot be celebrated and assisted at the same time.
That in order to be worthy of attention the very fabric of societal order has to have been sheered away; news media requires scenes that look like a zombie apocalypse, not scores of hometown heroes trying their best to rescue one another.
In these communities, families who lost everything feel guilty for letting someone give them money for a warm meal, because others have lost more. Neighbors organize care packages for people in the “devastated areas,” while floodwaters seep into their homes.
Friends let friends of friends, and complete strangers off the street, sleep in their beds and on their couches because they have a place that is dry and some room to spare.
People wait anxiously for the water to subside so that they can go and help their friends rebuild. Former high school classmates put up online lists of people to locate one another, connect with one another, and share supplies.
The local fisherman run rescue missions through streets that have become rivers to rescue families stranded on rooftops and trapped on highways; forming a “Cajun Navy” of volunteers. And former residents travel from cities like Chicago and D.C., taking vacation days from work, to make sure longtime friends have someone there to help them remove the water-soaked sheetrock from their house.
No stories of looting, no stories of riots, no devolving of society to the lowest forms of humanity…instead a tragedy that has brought out the best in friends, family, and neighbors; people who help others before they help themselves…who see the assistance of others as an assistance of self.
Rather than reward that with aid and bringing the full force of our collective national attention to examples of what resilient and strong American communities look like when challenged… these communities are ignored and left to fend for themselves… simply because they can.
The consequence of being a strong community is that your tragedy is not mentioned in national news, your strength uncelebrated, and your needs unmet unless they can be met through your own resilience. Humility and selflessly helping others does not fit the script of our news media… that is more of a tragedy than any flood.
Professor Paul Markel
Latest posts by Professor Paul Markel (see all)
- Tactical Rifle Tips: Transition Drills - January 5th, 2024
- 40/20/25 Shooting Drill - October 29th, 2023
- Working With Your Body Armor - October 3rd, 2023
- Hi-Point YC9: Yeet Cannon - August 14th, 2023
- Texas Hog Hunting: Day or Night w/ One Rifle - July 25th, 2023
Recent Comments