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Why do people hate the United States so much? It has many faults, but it hasn't given the world "nothing but pollution and death". It gave the modern world the idea of representative democracy, which probably would otherwise have died out after the failure of the French Revolution. It saved Europe from German domination in World War I, from Nazi tyranny in World War II and Soviet tyranny in the Cold War. America has often failed to live up to its own ideals, not least in that it didn't extend democracy to blacks in the Southern states until 1965, but it least it has ideals.
1.3 million people lived in the New Orleans metroplitan area, 600,000 of them in New Orleans itself. It's estimated that about 100,000 people didn't evacuate, nearly all of them in New Orleans itself (other parts of the metropolitan area have been fllooded, but the population had left). The reason, as Bitty2002 explained, was that they couldn't. Evacuation was possible for people with cars, but not for those without. There wasn't anything like enough public transport provided for the over 100,000 people without access to cars.
New Orleans is one of the least wealthy cities in the US. 63% of the population was black. The people who got left behind were mostly the poorest and well over 90% black. Other groups that got left behind were the very old, the disabled, the ill and tourists.
I don't think people should have lived in New Orleans, it was a disaster waiting to happen, but I'm not going to blame them for doing so. As Bitty2002 said, people don't choose where they get born.
When the evacuation order was given, Katrina was a category 5 hurricane headed straight for New Orleans. It was estimated that 50,000 people would die because a direct hit by a category 5 would have destroyed nearly all the buildings and caused the levees to fail catastrophically, flooding the city in minutes. I have to say that anyone who remained in their home and if they couldn't leave the city didn't try to go to the Superdome or the Convention Center was either hopelessly ill-informed or stupid. At the last minute, a wind diverted the centre of the hurricane to Gulfport and weakened it to a category 4. (As it happens, the roof of the Superdome nearly came off, so it wasn't as safe as thought - if a category 5 had hit, it would have come off and casualties in New Orleans would have been well above 50,000.)
The people who have suffered most are those at the bottom of American society. It's quite true that a lot of criminals took advantage of the breakdown of law to loot, rape and murder. But saying that the victims don't deserve help because a relatively small number have behaved in that way is appalling. A lot of people are at the bottom of society just because of their race and circumstances. They are the victims of the criminals. Blaming the victim is a common psychological reaction, but it's not fair.
Unfortunately that does seem to have been the attitude of the authorities. The US is normally fairly efficient at dealing with disasters, so it's incredible that it took 5 days to send food and water to the people at the Superdome and the Convention Center. It's also incredible that 1500 people were plucked from rooftops by helicopters, but then abandoned in a field with no food, no water and no shelter. Over a hundred of them have died. The state and federal authorities have both been extremely negligent. It's clear that Louisiana didn't have a plan for how to deal with this predictable emergency and didn't care to improvise one afterwards. It's also clear that the director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration and President Bush were extremely complacent, saying that everything was being done when in fact very little was being done.
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