Faith, Evolution, Money, and Affordable Housing
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American Locomotive Company's 4000 class "Big Boy" 4-8-8-4 articulated steam locomotive at the Railway and Locomotive Historical Museum Fairplex in Pamona, California |
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American Locomotive Company's 4000 class "Big Boy" 4-8-8-4 articulated steam locomotive at the Railway and Locomotive Historical Museum Fairplex in Pamona, California |
Those of us who survived Hurricane Katrina are painfully aware of the story about a devout man caught in a flood. The story goes that, as the water arose, a couple of soldiers (Marines, Seabees, etc.) came by in a big truck and offered him a lift to higher ground."No thanks," the man replied. "I believe the Lord will protect me."
A little while later, a fellow came by in a pirogue (a little rowboat, for all you non-Cajuns out there) and offered to give the man a ride.
"I believe that God will save me," the man replied, "but thanks anyway."
As the afternoon wore on and the water rose higher, a group of fishermen in a power boat stopped to rescue him, but the man refused again. Finally a policeman pulled up in a rubber Zodiak but the man, now sitting on the roof of his submerged house, still politely refused to leave his home.
"I believe Jesus will rescue me," the man insisted. "I don't need any help.
Finally, just before sundown, a helicopter pilot spotted the man sitting all alone on his roof and swooped down. "Grab hold of the skid," the pilot shouted, "I'll haul you to safety."
"Thanks just the same," the man called back, "but I believe the Lord will save me."
Some time during the night, of course, the water rose above the rooftops, and the man drowned. He found himself standing before the judgment seat of Almighty God to render an account of his services. "I served you well and faithfully!" the man declared angrily. "I believed in you! Why didn't you save me?"
"What did you expect me to do?" God replied sorrowfully. "I sent you a truck, three boats, and even a helicopter!"
My grandmother would have felt right at home at God's Katrina Kitchen. Grandma, a voracious Bible reader, knew from her study of Holy Scripture that the universe is just a teensy bit over 6,000 years old, the moon and the sun are physically similar lights in the firmament of the sky, there is no such thing as outer space, lions ate grass instead of gazelles before the time of a real guy named Noah, dinosaurs were contemporary with modern man, and everybody mentioned in the Bible, from Almighty God Himself to John the Relevator, spoke English because they are quoted as doing so in the Holy Bible.
That's the trouble with faith; it has nothing necessarily to do with truth. Like the man in the story, I can believe fervently that a miracle is going to happen to protect me from rapidly rising flood waters, and I can be totally wrong. A lot of people believed they could ride out the hurricane, and probably a lot more believed they could safely wait until it was too late to leave. A total of 1836 are believed to have died as a result, and the ones who believed that they were going to make it are just as dead as those who believed this was a good way to commit suicide. Faith is intellectual assent, a decision to believe something. If you believe something that's false, it's just as false as it would be if you didn't believe it. For faith to have any value except to make one feel good about being ignorant, it has to be based on knowledge and wisdom. Blind faith is an effective substitute for education only if you happen to be a fool.
Then there's the argument that there's no such thing as objective truth, there's only belief, and what I believe is what is "true" for me. These people argue vehemently that they're right and people who don't agree with them are wrong, but I won't go into that. As an engineer, I do know that what you believe about the design of the Space Shuttle has nothing whatever to do with whether it will actually survive reentry or not. One of the Space Shuttle thermal protection system quality assurance people I used to work with asserted vehemently that foam breaking off the External Tank could never, ever, ever hurt the Orbiter. Seven astronauts died proving him wrong! They're still dead!
A good example of the faith versus truth disagreement was brought home to me recently by a devout non-Catholic friend of mine. She claimed that she thought that our bishop, Thomas Rodi, was carrying out some kind of personal vendetta against the members of former St. Paul's Parish in Pass Christian, Mississippi, by announcing plans not to save St. Paul's church, which was heavily damaged by Katrina. Initially, the parish planned to rebuild the church where it stood vulnerable to future hurricanes, but after some deliberation (and the retirement of the local mission pastor) the bishop decided that it would be better to combine depopulated St. Paul's parish with the mission parish safely farther inland where the diocese owned more property, build the new church and school there, and have the one remaining pastor serve the combined congregation.
While my friend agreed that the problem was exacerbated by the retirement of the mission pastor and the unabated drastic decline in the ratio of US Catholic priests to parishioners over the past half century, she asserted that it was basically caused by the bishop not having enough faith. She maintained that the bishop should have used the money contributed for the rebuilding effort to reconstitute the St. Paul's church were it stood and have faith that (a) a new pastor would pop up unexpectedly from somewhere to serve it and (b) it wouldn't get hit by another hurricane sometime and have to start all over.
Not unlike the faith of the man in the story!
Now, because he is a Catholic, Bishop Rodi doesn't owe the least allegiance whatever to blind faith. Catholics are expected to believe what is true, and it is the function of the Catholic Church, whose direct personal representative to the Mississippi Gulf Coast the bishop is, to figure out what that is and tell them. Bishop Rodi's job, what we pay him for, (among other things, of course) is protecting what is actually in the best interests of his flock. He would be committing a serious sin (at least according to Catholic moral teaching) if he spent the hard earned contributions entrusted to him to indulge his personal fantasies, in the face of sound actuarial forecasts to the contrary. Shoot, maybe Almighty God wants to get rid of St. Paul's and its whiny and rebellious former parishioners. A goodly number of them said in widely-publicized public statements that they just wanted to make sure the former church building wasn't sold to a developer. What they actually asked in the complaint, on the other hand, for was money, filthy lucre! God decided to wash the church away twice already, and killed a bunch of its former pastors without replacing them. How much more evidence do we need that He is OK with what the bishop is doing? DUH!
Another example of faith versus truth involves hurricane insurance. A lot of people, including me, believed they didn't need flood insurance because their property couldn't ever be flooded. We were wrong. Others believed that their homeowner's policies protected them from flood as well as wind. They were wrong, too. Still others believed that the statement in their policies that "damage from a combination of wind and flood water is excluded from coverage" meant that damage from a combination of wind and flood water was really included in their coverage. They were wrong, too, although that fact took a decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and some people still don't believe it. Dickie Scruggs and his son were responsible for a lot of that. They're in jail now.
Finally, I know of at least one poor soul who believed that the company that issued a policy the very first words of which, printed in large, bold letters on the very top of the first page, were "THIS POLICY DOES NOT COVER ANY DAMAGE BY WATER," really meant that it did cover damage by water. She was wrong, too. They were all victims of belief in false doctrines. Their faith did not save them! Too bad!
These people who believed wrong things are now suffering the inevitable consequences, and many of them are still in denial. I can certainly understand that! If one fervently believes that he is protected against flood, only to find himself homeless and destitute when he finds out otherwise, what does that say about his ultimate faith-based salvation? What good is faith if it doesn't really protect you? What good, indeed!
One of the more vehement faith versus truth controversies has to do with evolution. Protestants have as much problem with Darwin's teaching of evolution of humans as Catholics did with Galileo's teaching of revolution of the solar system 260 years earlier. "Revolution" has come to mean "violent change," because it got Galileo in all kinds of trouble by pissing off his former long time friend, Pope Urban VIII. "Evolution" really means "a gradual change over time," but many people believe it means something like "the Bible is wrong."
Actually, evolution (like revolution) has very little to do with the Bible. It basically explains that the reason you can't buy flint axes in the local hardware store is because steel ones are easier to make and better suited to the chopping that people do nowadays. Unfortunately there are still those who have faith that supposed failure to find a "missing link" between modern man and other modern apes means that they're not related, and evolution, as they understand it, is therefore "wrong." It's like not finding a "missing link" between my Toyota Prius and Alco's "Big Boy" steam locomotive "proves" that they are not both descended from Nicholas Joseph Cugnot's steam powered carriage that created the first motor vehicle accident in 1771 by running into a wall.
Biological, and some other kinds of, evolution consist of the happy marriage of random variation with natural selection. If your kids happen to have an inheritable characteristic that makes them even one percent more likely to survive to childbearing years then other kids, within 70 generations (1400 years or so) half your descendants will have that characteristic. Eventually, virtually everyone will have it. If you understand logarithms, do the math. If you don't, just trust me!
The characteristic doesn't have to be physical. If you are more likely to survive after a hurricane (by having a hurricane resistant house, or good insurance, or being rich enough to insure yourself or not living where hurricanes happen in the first place), eventually all the people in your community will be like you. The others will have moved away or been drowned. Think of it as evolution in action.
Things evolve to fit their environment, and sometimes change that environment in the process, resulting in a dynamic process of continual modification. People in areas of the world where it's too cold to expose enough of a dark skin to remain healthy, for example, have evolved light skin to maximize the production of vitamins from their limited exposure to sunlight. Nowadays, we get vitamins from fortified milk and vitamin supplements. Modern people move around a lot, so having light skin is not the benefit it once was. I'm told that, as a result, natural blondes are likely to become extinct in the next few hundred years (sniff!).
In poor countries, where children are necessary to support parents in their old age, people have lots of them. In "developed" countries, where having children is a drain on earning power, people have few. In Africa, where few people get adequate medical care, almost all the adults are naturally immune to diseases against which Americans, who have no such immunity, have to be inoculated before they start school. Conversely, people of African extraction seem to have difficulty adapting to the educational and cultural requirements of developed countries, with social consequences that are all too obvious in the United States and the emerging countries of war-torn Africa.
We mess with evolution only at our peril. In the case of the believers in false insurance doctrines, billions of dollars of your tax money has been spent by your federal government, as well as private agencies, to provide homes to other people too lazy to work, or too shortsighted to buy adequate insurance, or too stupid to know that if you live for very long in a place subjected to hurricanes since the last ice age, the chances are good that you're going to get hit by one. That money is unlikely ever to be recovered. Those who learn from past disasters and try to prepare better for the next one, like Bishop Rodi, are castigated, slandered and vilified. We Gulf Coast dwellers have been inundated since the hurricane with televised news stories of people without adequate insurance or income demanding the same compensation that the intelligent folks, those who paid for appropriate coverage, received. None of them are suggesting that we be reimbursed for the money we spent. Others of limited means gratefully accepted from charitable organizations rebuilt homes that are already showing signs of poor maintenance. If they're not washed away in the next major hurricane, they are going to be gone with the wind.
It is probably a government function to provide temporary relief from a natural disaster, if only to prevent the victims from becoming so destitute that they have to resort to widespread pillage and looting to survive. Preventing epidemics and providing access to enough education so one can have a reasonable chance of becoming a good citizen are also probably legitimate government functions. On the other hand, you are entitled to a home or a car or health care or a decent living or taking care of momma only if you are willing and able to pay for those things. They are not civil rights, no matter how much you believe that they are or should be! If you live in society, those things you get come from other people who produce them. They need to get stuff, too. If you don't produce something they need or want just as much in return, you are a liability to that society, and it's better for everyone else if you go the way of the dodo.
The "baby boomers" are examples of that liability. They are now beginning to retire with a federal debt of about ten trillion dollars ($10,000,000,000,000!), over 38 times what it was when they were born, right after their parents financed (and suffered through, and fought, and won) a disastrous global war. Because they failed during their earning years to reimburse their government for what they received and to provide for their old age, these members of the "me generation" are now facing maxed out credit, foreclosure on their homes, no private retirement funds, and eventual bankruptcy of Social Security. They have left every man, woman and child in the United States (including themselves and the relatively few children they managed to produce) with a national debt of over $33,000 each, and they're now producing still less than they consume. They recently elected a President who plans to add another $4700 to that debt during his administration alone. They've been making their beds for all their dissipative lives, and now they're going to have to sleep in them. What's going to happen to the "flower children" when the consequences of "turning on, tuning in and dropping out" catch up with them? Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!
Except for the obscenely rich, who are automatically protected against catastrophe, smart people buy insurance. The way insurance works is very simple. The insurance company bets the client that he won't have a covered loss, and it takes his money to cover that bet. Some insurance companies get money from other sources, such as the sale of their corporate stock. One gets money back by selling his stock, hopefully at a net profit, by receiving dividends from it, or by submitting a claim for a covered loss. That's why insurance companies exist in the first place, to make money for their investors. Clients of mutual insurance companies are automatically stockholders as well, so they get a dividend check every year, like I do, if the company's income exceeds its payment in operating expenses and claims. What constitutes a covered loss and how much one must pay to be protected against it are carefully specified in the insurance agreement. If one later cancels his insurance, or defaults on his payments, he may or may not get some of his money back, depending on the agreement (not on what he believes he should get).
The terms of the agreement are written down in a policy, so everyone has an opportunity to understand them to begin with and recall them later. Faith is simply not a factor. Insurers are required by law to be fair and responsible and use reasonably clear language in the policy, but in the US, everyone over 21 (over 18 in some states) is free to sign and pay for a policy he is too ignorant to understand or, in some cases, even read! Insurance companies are not even allowed to refuse to insure people because they're stupid, and stupidity has always been a potentially capital crime! Think of it as evolution in action! The insurance companies, who write the policies, are very careful to specify exactly what they are agreeing to, because they know that if the customers have a loss, any loss at all, they're going to abandon every shred of integrity and decency they claim to have and try to screw the insurance companies to the wall, as they are doing this very minute in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
Insurance companies are supposed to make money. If they don't, they go bankrupt and can't pay any claims, no matter how legitimate, or they have to pay legitimate claimants less than what both of them agreed to and the claimants paid for. Also, their stock becomes worthless, and their investors, many of whom are pensioners and retirees, lose all their money. Bankruptcy of insurance companies therefore is a breach of trust between them and their policyholders and their stockholders. This is such a serious concern that there are all kinds of legal operating requirements for insurance companies, and they have to comply with each and every one to protect their investors and clients. So in addition to defrauding their clients, executives of bankrupt insurance companies frequently go to jail. This gives them a powerful incentive not to let that happen.
The way they don't let that happen is to make sure they understand as much as humanly possible what the risks against which they are insuring are and being very careful to take in premiums more than they pay out in claims and operating expenses. Insurance companies are also required to maintain a comfortable net worth, so they have to make sure that the price of their stock stays above a minimum value. Since nobody controls what the stock price is and what the losses are, insurance company executives, actuaries and accountants are among the world's most conservative. Here faith is involved, but it's backed up by hard, cold, facts, calculations, experience, and historical records.
This is why the burden of proof that any particular loss is covered under an insurance policy rests with the policyholder, not with the company, regardless of what the policyholder believes. The elements of proof are: (1) that a particular loss actually occurred, (2) that it represents a particular amount, (3) that this amount is less than or equal to the value of the policy, and (4) that it arose from a cause specifically covered in the policy.
Insurance companies do not stay in business very long if they leave a lot of loopholes in their policies. Accordingly, some of the elements of proof that the clients have to agree with to buy the policy in the first place are pretty severe. For example, all the homeowner policies I know of exclude losses associated with any kind of flooding. The reason is that it's damned difficult to tell what the mechanism of damage was in a windstorm if flood water was there, too. Federal flood insurance covers the losses where it's difficult to tell. If you live on the Gulf Coast, you need to buy some, regardless of what the realtor told you. Your faith that God will provide gratis the security your smarter neighbors paid for won't save you. Also, there is a ceiling on the amount of the claim. My insurance company paid me maximum book value for my beautiful, fully restored, freshly painted, copsucker red 1979 Corvette with the black racing stripes, even though it was actually worth much more. I should have had it appraised for the extra value, paid the extra premium, and gotten that money back after it had been submerged in the rising Mississippi Sound. I didn't. I'll know better next time. I think of it as evolution in action.
Insurance companies are not faith-based charitable organizations. They are the custodians of the security, and sometimes the survival, of their policyholders and stockholders, and they have every legal and moral right to make lots of money by doing that. That money goes right into the pockets of their investors, who gambled that they wouldn't go bankrupt illegally paying stingy people for being stupid as well. What they owe their clients and stockholders is not only money, it is the trust and confidence that the hard-earned money entrusted to them in premiums and stock purchases is paid only as they both agreed. Anyone who gets anything from an insurance company that the company didn't agree to is stealing. The operative rule is, "Thou Shalt Not Steal," no matter how much the insurance companies made last year or what your rich, bloodsucking lawyer claims or what you happen to believe about it!
The insurance companies try to figure out as precisely as possible what their expenses per customer are likely to be, and charge each customer a wee bit more. The wee bit more is their profit, and it's a good thing. It's retirement income for old folks, college funds for young folks, and the reason the companies exist in the first place. They have to guess how much they'll have to pay for smarmy client lawyers and fraudulent client claims and unjust decisions by prejudiced juries and politically motivated state judges hoping to get reelected, and add that to the premiums they charge their clients. If no losses happen, everybody's happy and the old investors get to keep on eating and the young investors get to go to school. If losses do happen, it is in the best interest of the company to settle quickly and equitably, to avoid the cost of litigation and the appearance of bad faith. If they want to keep doing business, they really want to be good neighbors.
Clients don't.
I am absolutely appalled at the number of people in my community who were willing to sell their souls and what honor they formerly had for filthy lucre! They say it's not about the money, but when they say it's not about the money, it's always about the money. People whose neighbors were all flooded out claimed vehemently that every single stick of their homes was completely blown away even before the storm surge got there, in spite of the fact that surrounding homes not in the flood were still standing. Others claimed damage for homes or possessions that didn't even exist. Still others looked for someone to sue because they didn't even have insurance, but felt that it was probably someone else's fault that they bought jewelry and motorcycles instead!
A group of Mississippi lawyers, eager to make a fast buck from human stupidity, greed and suffering, sued the insurance companies for punitive, as well as compensatory, damages. George Dale, the state Insurance Commissioner, was defeated in the last election for his attempts to restore some kind of reason to the madness. He was vindicated in another decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to the effect that State Farm was forced by the hysteria to shell out millions of dollars in claims it wasn't legally obligated to pay, but he's still out of a job. We'll see if the federal government starts looking into fraudulent flood insurance claims and applications for federal assistance to which the applicants were not entitled, either. Watch this space!
I can probably walk outside and throw a rock and hit someone who thinks he should have received more compensation for his alleged storm loss than he did, but in over three years since Hurricane Katrina, I haven't heard anyone claim that he or she should have paid more in insurance premiums. Not a single soul! In some cases, the carrion eaters have forced the insurance companies to pay their expenses and fees for suing them, and politicians and legislators have begun dorking around with the laws under which the companies are forced to operate in an effort to get them to pay more, or take in less, or both.
The results have been as predictable as the phases of the moon. The insurance companies, who have to operate at a profit, have begun raising their rates, declining to renew existing policies, and refusing to write new ones. State and federal legislators have attempted to make this whole process less painful by allocating tax money to ease the suffering, in the oft-expressed belief that forcibly taking money from responsible people and simply donating it to irresponsible ones isn't armed robbery if the government does it. Still others are trying to "spread the risk" by combining the premiums from larger numbers of clients in areas of different risk to provide for the greater prospective costs of catastrophes where they are guaranteed to occur. We'll see how that works out when Mississippi policyholders have to pay for hurricane damage in Florida - or New England.
Of course, no one with a shred of human decency can help but feel sorry for people who lost everything because they were financially overextended, or mistaken, or misled, or uneducated, or just plain stupid. Suffering is suffering, no matter who does it. But that's the cost of freedom. One of the many nice things about living in Cuba is the fact that Fidel will take care of you. But guess which way the illegal refugees are coming! Despite all its advantages, most people don't really like living with its disadvantages. Slavery isn't much better. Just ask one of "Massa Ray" Nagin's darkies!
The next time you pay your insurance premiums or your income taxes, consider for a moment how much extra you are paying for what ended up in the pockets of the lawyers who sued your insurance company and others like it for fraudulent claims. Did you get your money's worth? You decide. Remember your decision next time you vote! Unfortunately, the damage has already been done in the Mississippi state elections, but at least we had sense enough to reelect responsible mayors and a competent governor.
Probably the most egregious example of the faith versus truth controversy has to do with affordable housing. I am sick of hearing about affordable housing! All housing is affordable to somebody, otherwise it wouldn't be called "housing," it would be called "warehousing" or "office space." There are people who fervently believe that the government owes you a place to live, but one need only take a look at New Orleans to see what a really bad idea that is. There you can find city block after city block of public apartment buildings that have been stripped to the rafters of every salable item by residents whose families have never owned a home but truly believe they lost one in the hurricane and somebody owes them a replacement.
It made me proud to be an American to see the response of my government and my society to the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. I evacuated to Maxwell Air Force Base, whose commander generously made its facilities, including the bachelor officers' quarters, available to military retirees like me. They also used the airfield as a staging area for the big semitrailers hauling supplies in from distant warehouses, there to be redistributed to smaller vehicles and taken out to the waterlogged people in need of them. I watched the hurricane come ashore on television, surrounded by American Red Cross workers and vehicles already loaded with blankets, bottled water and emergency food and medicine, waiting for the hurricane to get far enough inland so they could get to the Coast to provide needed relief. Within days, the good people of Thy Word Network had set up God's Katrina Kitchen, where one could get a hot meal, good used clothing, and living supplies donated by similarly generous agencies and individuals. No society in the history of the civilized world has ever provided such comprehensive, immediate and overwhelming assistance to people in need, and anyone who claims otherwise is a fool, a liar, or both! I know! I was there!
In New Orleans, where law and social services broke down because of the slave mentality of the victims and the incompetence of their leaders, positive response took a little longer. It wasn't helped by the looters shooting at the rescuers. But eventually recovery services started to flow in... and flow in... and flow in. Much of the lower ninth ward is still a ghost town because many people who lived there don't realize how much money, not to mention work, it takes to reconstitute a neighborhood of "affordable housing" populated by people whose income allows them merely to get by. That's why I don't live there (among other reasons). The federal government has already spent billions "improving" levees that are absolutely guaranteed to fail some day. It has announced plans to spend another 12 billion dollars ($12,000,000,000!) to refurbish New Orleans so people on welfare can continue to find "affordable housing" in a bowl surrounded by higher water. That's $36.00 for every man, woman and child in the United States. I don't know about you, but providing crappy homes for welfare recipients in flood zones isn't worth my 36 bucks!
With so many people displaced, your taxes and mine were spent bussing New Orleans residents to other cities like Houston where the crime rate immediately began to skyrocket. For those who stayed, we rented every hotel room and apartment available to give those rendered homeless 90 days to find someplace else to live. Unfortunately, "find someplace else to live" was a concept that people who had always been given someplace to live found difficult or impossible to comprehend. Predictably, when the 90 days was up, they still had no place to go, no way to get there, and no means to enable them to stay. Some of them are still homeless, waiting for "affordable housing" that will depend on the largess of the taxpayers ever to be built.
Actually, there's "affordable housing" all over. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is dotted every few hundred yards with row upon row of brand new apartment complexes and condominiums (condominia?) that are filling up with displaced people as fast as they're being built. There are also empty refrigerator crates for people who can't afford anything else if they have a place to put them. But people who are waiting for steak on a corn flake budget are going to go hungry, especially if they can't even afford corn flakes. That's the way capitalism works. If you don't like it you can make it to Cuba the same way the Cubans come here, using anything that floats! "Good luck," say I, and "Good riddance!" as well!
Ever since the hurricane, New Orleans has been held up as an example of all the failures of government assistance. But it was the people, including it's mayor, who failed, not the federal government. The fact is, New Orleans was on the good side of Hurricane Katrina. It was the flood that caused all the damage; a flood caused two days later by refusal of New Orleans residents over half a century to pass needed bond issues to maintain their ratty levees. If you want to see people really rebuilding after the hurricane, come to Mississippi. It just goes to show what happens when we try to mess with evolution. The best thing for the United States, in the long run, would be to dynamite the New Orleans levees and let nature, and the Mississippi River, take its course. Think of it as evolution in action.
Where homeless people (or donors) owned land to put them on, the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided free FEMA trailers for "eighteen months." Many of them are still there. Initially, these were available travel trailers and single wide mobile homes. But in a remarkably short time, manufacturers all over the US were cranking them out and they were being provided free of charge at elevations high enough that they wouldn't immediately flood again.
Now, I'll admit, I'm basically trailer trash. I liked mobile home living. My current abode is a very sturdy factory built home that many people mistake for a bricked-up doublewide, didn't suffer any damage from the hurricane, and suits me just fine. My first home, when I was a bachelor in the Army, was a 12' x 60' mobile unit that I had specially designed and constructed to be easy to move, quick to set up and comfortable to live in. I could be reassigned, have my quarters moved to my new duty station, open the door, and immediately be home. Like the FEMA trailer residents, I had everything I needed. Unlike the FEMA trailer residents, I paid about a year's income for it, so perhaps I appreciated it a little more than they did.
It wasn't more than a few weeks after the FEMA trailers started to arrive that the bitching started. They were too small! They didn't have enough hot water! There wasn't enough storage space! The air conditioners didn't work right! It was too hard to cook on the small ranges! And on and on and on! People who should have been grateful to get a blanket and a canvas tarp were complaining that their free temporary dwellings smelled of formaldehyde or used too much propane!
These whinybabies are still complaining that there isn't enough "affordable housing" on the Gulf Coast, and they want the government (read those of us who pay taxes and rent or mortgages) to Do Something About It. The politicians have complied by replacing the FEMA trailers with little "shotgun style" "Katrina cottages." There are now two of them on the street where I live, where the storm surge washed away the houses. One of them is parked right on top of the spot where the property owners had to promise to rebuild within two years, right next to their extra cars, boat, lawn furniture, and travel trailer. Katrina cottage owners don't have to skirt their homes or landscape their yards, so they have now torpedoed my property values by turning my formerly quaint, picturesque neighborhood into an instant slum. I don't know how much I personally was required to contribute to this abomination, but it was too damned much!
In retrospect, I think the FEMA trailers and the Katrina cottages were a bad idea motivated by the best of intentions. They provided too much incentive for their residents to get complacent. In spite of the griping, most FEMA trailer and Katrina cottage dwellers are perfectly willing to live there until they're kicked out, and many aren't saving a dime or making any plans for rebuilding real homes. The theory seems to be that they have to have someplace to live, and if they want to stay in their old neighborhoods, it's up to somebody else to make that possible. In the next hurricane, I think the people who didn't buy good enough insurance should be given FEMA pup tents in a CCC-type setup that provides public works jobs every day for those who stay instead of going somewhere else, and retains a portion of the wages in escrow until the person moves into his own place.
It's all about the money. Very few people can afford to simply purchase a home. They have to save for a down payment, act responsibly with their other debts to assure good credit, and then take out a mortgage on the home of their dreams and pay for the rest of their lives. But they have to learn to dream responsibly, too. In addition to real estate costs, there's interest on the mortgage, utilities, maintenance and insurance. If you can't afford all of these expenses, you can't afford the home, even if you fervently believe otherwise. You simply cannot afford a Beverly Hills mansion on a mountaineer cabin income, and faith that you can doesn't change that. The people who bought too much home and not enough insurance, or agreed to pay low, innocuous mortgage rates "now" for crushing rates "later," or let their homes get so dilapidated that they couldn't withstand the storm, were simply not compatible with their environment. Hurricanes are God's creatures; they are good things. They are His slum clearance measures. They get rid of dead trees, improperly built and maintained homes, and stupid people all in one fell swoop! Think of it as evolution in action.
Now, I've always wanted to live in Beverly Hills in a huge Queen Anne gothic mansion with winding staircases and drawing rooms and secret passages and pictures that are really doors or one-way mirrors and dark hallways with unexpected adjoining rooms, all overlooking the "little people." The reason I don't live there is because I can't afford it. What I can afford is a boxy, single story red brick 4 bedroom, two bath hurricane resistant structure on 4/10 of an acre of suburban real estate in quaint, charming, backwoods, economical, redneck, southern Mississippi. After I lived there for several years, somebody cleared the virgin forest to the west and built some really nifty quarter- to million dollar homes there, but I can't afford them, either. My new next door neighbor is a diamond retailer, so he can. I'm retired, so I can't. Both of us fit nicely into our respective environments. Evolution in action, again.
If you want to live in Destiny Oaks next door, more power to you, but you'll have to have a really good source of income. If you want to live right here in Sweet Haven, plan to pay as much for your home as mine is worth. If you can't afford to live in my neighborhood, live somewhere else, and God bless you, but you don't deserve to live in my neighborhood any more than anyone else who can't afford it does. If someone didn't get enough education to get a good enough job to work hard enough to make enough money to afford to live like I do, it isn't my fault, and it isn't my problem, either. Maybe it would help if that person had a little more faith in himself, but it would probably also help if he'd work a little harder and reorder his priorities!
Vaya con Dios, amigos!