FEMA Hangovers - On being too close to a disaster

Dear Mr. Rawles,
The anniversaries of Katrina and Rita offer us an useful opportunity to reflect upon the lessons of profound adversity. As a Texan and a native of Houston, the disaster and its aftermath have reminded me of three important truths. First, we were all cautioned that the time to leave is well before the mass of people thinks that leaving is reasonable. Second, if you do plan to stick around, plan to be on your own for longer than you expected in conditions more harsh than you anticipated. Third, any mass-casualty disaster is going to let loose a plague-like horde of the worthless, the dangerous, and the desperate.

The first two lessons are obvious to most people who frequent this blog, but the third point merits some serious discussion. In each and all of our major cities, there lurks a small (but lethally dangerous) element of congenitally predatory scum that the combination of the criminal justice system and differential property value usually manages to mostly confine to a small geographic area. In each and all of our major cities, there also lurks a class attuned to permanent dependence on government subsidy, which normally lacks the initiative to pose any serious threat to anyone. Katrina displaced both of these classes from the rotten slums of New Orleans and placed both of them as a threat to the good people of other cities, especially Houston.

When the dangerous class of New Orleans arrived on busses in Houston, it immediately sought new victims and new territory. Crime increased dramatically in Houston, and I understand anecdotally that the standing inventory of most FFL dealers shrank radically as law abiding citizens suddenly began to feel threatened. The filth of New Orleans awoke in Houston, shorn from the institutions (e.g. regular parole officer visits) that had constrained their previous felonious conduct. You may think that New Orleans is the Mos Eisley of America, but every major city has such a class of dangerous people, the control of whom is the primary job of every major city’s police force. Just as every river flowing through a large city has a layer of settled toxin in the deep sediments, which only endangers the world at large if the bottom is churned catastrophically, the depopulation of any major city due to a disaster must necessarily loose upon the world a class of people that we would all do well to fear.

Cinnamon wrote:It is a very scary thought...I've long said in a societal breakdown, anyone who makes it out to where we are...did bad things to get here. We are not on the beaten path and the average city dweller wouldn't think to come here unless they'd been here before (highly unlikely).