It is sadly ironic that having grown up and lived in the north east my entire life that I have never experienced a need for the national guard in my lifetime. A few months ago, I even heard some rumblings from state governors around the country that they were not prepared for local situations that would require deployment of their guard, because they were already deployed in Iraq. I have to be honest I paid it little or no attention at the time, because I figured it did not really effect me. Having watched the utter destruction by Hurricane Katrina of New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast this week on TV has made me rethink my naïveté.
According to the Army National Guard website the mission of the individual state National Guard is as follows: (
http://www.arng.army.mil/about_us/aiding_america.asp)
“The Army National Guard exists in all 50 states, three territories and the District of Columbia. The state, territory or district leadership is the Commanders in Chief for each Guard. Their Adjutants General are answerable to them for the training and readiness of the units. At the state level, the governors reserve the ability, under the Constitution of the United States, to call up members of the National Guard in time of domestic emergencies or need.”
I don’t have confirmation of these numbers, but I heard the Louisiana National Guard, has 11, 000 soldiers on active duty, 8,000 of those are currently deployed in Iraq. Now my math shows that leaves about 3,000 men and woman left on the ground in the state of Louisiana to help assist with this natural disaster, which is the true mission of the National Guard as defined above. The mission statement says nothing about defending democracy and fighting a debatable war of terrorism half-way around the globe. However, our glorious draft dodging President has seen it fit to send these soldiers overseas and they are not around to do what they signed up for protecting the state. So the fundamental question is, why are they not in Louisiana doing their job?
As a strict Jeffersonian Libertarian, who believes that states have very specific constitutional rights and thus can refuse requests from the federal government when the request violates the constitutional rights of the state, I have an issue with the whole deployment since these soldiers of the Louisiana National Guard have dedicated themselves to the defense and protection of the their state, their homeland, and this is a clear violation of the second amendment, but as I said, that is another issue.
I am not saying that with a larger force the Louisiana National Guard, would have had a better chance to help prevent the chaos and anarchy that has erupted in the big easy, but I guess we will never know. It makes me question our reasons for being in Iraq in the first place, but again that is obviously another issue as well.
I am heart broken and sad seeing what is happening in the Gulf Coast and specifically in New Orleans, and knowing that the Big Easy may never be the same again. I have always had a fondness in my heart for New Orleans. It was a place where you could go to and know you were going to have fun. I think it was the only place I never wanted to live, simply because I liked visiting there. If I lived there, I would need to get a job, and it would be regular and normal. It would lose its allure and charm. It was always alright to go there and drink until you could no longer stand, to party like you had never partied before. I once drove there for Mardi-Gras, leaving LaGuardia Airport in a February blizzard, driving 21 hours straight through the night, getting out of the mini-van and feeling suprisingly not tired but rather that it was time to drink and have some fun. I could sleep later, but now that we were there, it was time to party. No other town I have been to has ever made me feel that way, and now it is potentially gone forever, flooded under 20 feet of water.
Worse yet, I feel for the people living in the Gulf Coast, whose homes were destroyed, whose business were lost and whose lives will probably never be the same. Some commentator on CNN said this has the potential to be this century’s dust bowl, a period in the 1930’s when farms in the southwest simply dried up and blew away. These people just got up and left Oklahoma and Texas leaving their dried and withered homes and farms with no money, no jobs and no where to go. The potential impact of this Hurricane is very similar with up to 100,000 homeless people, wandering the south for months, with no where to go, looking for work, hoping to find something or someplace to start over.
It is interesting to hear why people stayed in their homes; “We have been through hurricanes before”; “It never got this bad”, “We made it through Camille in 1969 and we are still here”. I guess this was worse. Now anarchy and chaos reigns with armed bandits looting and dead bodies floating everywhere in New Orleans and the Saints will be like the old 1899 Cleveland Spiders, probably never playing a home game this year. It will also be interesting to read the sociological studies done in the future to determine how society broke down and deteriorated in just a few days there. Overall it is Very Sad!
Wouldn’t it be interested in President Bush were forced to serve his last month in the Alabama National Guard now and really have to physically clean up this mess? Again, I think that is another issue.
If you want to help go to the American Red Cross website (
http://www.redcross.org/) and make a donation. I assume that every charity and non-profit will be sending out emails, throwing up a tithing plates, sending around a charity basket and generally collecting donations to help the victims of this terrible disaster. If we learned anything from the Tsunami in Southeast Asia last December, is too many hands in the pot, spoils the broth. So many international agencies collected money it was impossible to tell how much was collected or where it was going. Let’s avoid that situation this time, and donate directly to the Red Cross, where they can and know how to put the donations to good use and will do so immediately.
My prayers go out to the victims of this disaster, and to all of the citizens of the United States that are now going to have to pay upwards of $3 and $4 for a gallon of gasoline, while I almost guarantee that big oil companies will show huge profits over the next year. Just a guess.
Buy shares in Sunoco, BP, Standard Oil (Exxon/Mobil) and Texaco now, as I am sure there stocks will rise and this next year will be very good for them.