TheRustyCook

People don't prepare anymore

Well here we are a couple of weeks past the hurricane. First thing is that it is fully apparent that people did not take seriously the need for speed and decisiveness in the response. Chertoff is at least as culpable as Brown for the delays. It also shows that we need to take seriously disaster response. A troop of Boy Scouts could have done a better job. I know because I used to be a Boy Scout.

In the aftermath now we have some hard questions to answer. It is imperative for the federal, state and local governments to step in during an emergency like this. Now we have the rebuilding though. This is the point where what I am about to say will probably anger many. Most people are calling for massive amounts of money to be poured into the area to rebuild what has been destroyed. Money, I assume, that is suppose to come from the tax payers. In the old days people, usually, would save up money for a rainy day (hehe interesting irony in that pun). The idea was that you never knew what was coming so you needed to be prepared. Well now we have a big government that will "take care of us all" so we do not need to save.

It is one thing for people in a local community to voluntarily band together and help their neighbors. In this case it is even great that people from across the country are moving in to volunteer time and effort to help out. What is maddening is when people build in a flood plain in a town that is below sea level, and do not plan for the disaster that will inevitably come. That is just stupidity and childishness.

Now I know that I am not perfect and that I have not always had savings either, however I try to be self sufficient. I also would like others to try to. We need to foster an attitude change in this country back to the more self-sufficent mindset that people used to have. I can tell you why I know this is true. Many people reading this will say that I am insensitive to expect people to prepare, that I just do not understand thier plight. Well my wife and I have been through a number of hard times and we have struggled hard to get through them. There were times we got help from family, friends, and church members, but we also worked hard to move out of the problems and toward better days. Without that deep desire to do that we would never be out of the problem times.

Well now we will see tons of money going to help out down there, and to top it off the libs in congress will tell me how we cannot "afford" any tax cuts and will even have to increase the tax burden on the rest of us. Yeah right. Any excuse to take more of my money away from me. And to think that at one time the income tax rate was like a lowly 4%.

Well there you go.... some thoughts to chew on.

posted by AtomicSuperGeek @ 9:50 PM