When you got nuthin', you got nuthin' to lose

From Jonah Goldeberg's The Corner comes this letter:

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the physical suffering in New Orleans is of those who remained in the city notwithstanding what I understand to have been a mandatory evacuation order. Now, some stayed on purpose - that's one thing. But I'm willing to bet that the majority of those who stayed stayed because they had no way to get out of New Orleans - they didn't have a car or couldn't afford to drive it anywhere far enough out of town. (Also, although this isn't entirely predictable from a planning standpoint, poor people don't have money at the end of the month.)[emphasis mine]

So why didn't New Orleans (or any city) have a plan to use whatever transportation facilities (like, uh, buses) it had available to transport those who couldn't get out of town but who wanted to? That's something that can't be discounted as "armchair quarterbacking" or under the "we had no idea it would be this bad" excuse. If you are going to tell people to evacuate a place, you need to help those who can't evacuate get the hell out - and unlike the post-hurricane issues, the required resources are almost entirely predictable ahead of time - every city knows how many cars it has, how many residents are on welfare, etc.

Imagine how different the picture would be today if the only ones still in N.O. were those who had chosen to ride out the storm.

As I've told many people over the last few years, the racial subtext to much of the criticism of looters is disquieting. The implication is, "Those poor, dirty, smelly darkies didn't have much anyway; it's only natural that they'd revert to barbarism eventually."