Called Out.

Joey Bacala                                                           October 10, 2016 at 8:18 AM   

"The seething hate that had me cheering on Hurricane Katrina and giggling like a psychopath at the aftermath has been replaced with mere intense dislike."

Fatalities: (directly or indirectly caused by Katrina)
- Alabama: 2
- Florida: 14
- Georgia: 2
- Louisiana: 1,577
- Mississippi: 238
- Total: 1,833
Source: FEMA

At this point Mike, I don't think you were giggling 'like a psychopath'; I think that just makes you a psychopath.

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Fair enough, Joey. I can respect where you're coming from, and I'm not particularly proud of my response at the time. It was an honest reaction, based on previous extremely unpleasant experiences, and obviously didn't take into consideration the lives lost or disrupted. For me (at the time), it was like seeing a meth lab was bulldozed. That's just where I was back then and how I viewed the region. What use is a blog if I can't be brutally honest or blatantly dishonest as the mood strikes?
 
However, I'd say I'm more of a mild sociopath, and have the online test results to prove it.
   
Your numbers may or may not be accurate, though. Nobody really knows. That said, it's was far too many. People got complacent.
  
In five or ten years, when the scars of Katrina fade, the idiots on the Gulf Coast will go back to ignoring hurricanes like they always did. They'll fill their bathtubs full of ice and beer and throw parties. They'll grab their surfboards and go out and play in the riptides. They'll generally ignore every evacuation order until the roads are clogged, closed, or otherwise impassible. The local governments will have no effective plans in place to evacuate those who can't otherwise evacuate, because they're corrupt and/or criminally irresponsible. I saw it in the aftermath of countless hurricanes on the Gulf Coast. People have an amazing capacity to ignore the obvious.
 
However, when the big one hits Anchorage, of a similar or greater magnitude to the earthquake of 1964, how will I feel? Obviously, we'll have nobody on Fox News screaming at us that we're all going to die if we don't evacuate, so it's not quite a perfect parallel. We all should realize it's coming, though. We get reminders all of the time. It will be bad enough if it happens during the summer, but imagine if it happened in the middle of winter. Utter chaos. Hopefully our state and local governments and utilities have sufficient plans in place to quickly recover, but everyone has a plan until they're hit. It wouldn't take much to completely isolate the Anchorage bowl for the short term. A lot of people would be hurt and killed. If I'm not one of them, I'll be digging out just like everyone else. It isn't going to be fun. Hopefully we invest the FEMA money better than Biloxi and Gulfport did.
  
Chances are, there will be more than a few people that say "serves them right for living there". I will probably have trouble arguing with their logic. We all make choices and accept liabilities when we choose to live someplace. All locales on this planet have their good and bad points. However, ignoring the negatives is never a good idea.
  
Yeah, I'm an imperfect and egocentric person. I'll own that. I have my biases and prejudices just like everyone else. Do I intensely dislike the Gulf Coast? Absolutely. Do I dislike the people? Some of them, although I could say that just about everywhere. I will say that the further I go inland, the more I relate and the more I relax. Some people are the exact opposite, preferring the beach and water and the culture that surrounds them.
 
Go figure.