Veneer

Learning that a military rescue helicopter was fired on from the Superdome was a jolt into a sharpened state of perception. Just as water peels veneer from furniture, Katrina has stripped New Orleans of its affectation of easygoing cheer. Before the storm struck we learned that New Orleans was home to a significant number of dependent people. It is among those people that street gangs flourished and were tolerated. Now disaster has laid bare the weakness which has suddenly taken hold. In this way, New Orleans was nurturing its potentially fatal flaws just as Great Britain was doing the same with radical islamofascists. Turning a blind eye to a whole segment of citizens who refuse to become contributors to their chosen society is no different from leaving landmines across the terrain.
Of course there are those among any population who cannot care for themselves. It is not those people of whom I speak. It is those burly thugs who have nothing better to do than to loot, threaten, and rant about having been 'oppressed' whom I call out for their venality. And the city which prided itself on a laissez faire attitude about them has been exposed as a façade for subhumans.