Craziness in New Orleans

Dave

I am not saying it would be the same magnitude but I don't see anything differently happening here. People are in survival mode right now. You think too highly of people. Imagine losing all of your possesions, possibly family members, and most certainly pets. Dead bodies are floating in the water, Your city is gone and not safe. To survive you need to get out, yet there isn't enough buses, or places to go. Your not getting what you need to survive and the heat is incredible. Your starving. And your telling me a Canadian City would be doing the old "Help thy neighbour" 95% of people in the world would be, but the news only reports the 5% of people. I mean I have seen people get into fights over not making a right hand turn quick enough, or a fight on the golf course because a group is playing too slow. I can see everything that is happening there, happen here.

"Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy today." - The Toronto Star

Come on Sandman... don't tell me you think it'd get that bad here... I certainly hope that it wouldn't. That's just craziness...

Dave

Just think in Toronto you get shot at for disrespecting someone on a bus, and a little girl gets shot in the process, with no witnesses coming forward, so don't think this country is any better. This righteous attitude of we are better then the states is getting pretty old, and to be honest is not the truth.

Fair enough, you're right, we're not as a general rule better than they are in a lot of cases. Though, I would bet that the gun used in that bus shooting was smuggled across the border illegally from the US.

I'm with Dave on this one, I don't see things getting anywhere near that bad up here. Maybe in Toronto...but when you're located in the middle of the universe, different rules apply right? ;)

Maybe I'm wrong, and I sure hope we never have to find out.

I think the big difference is that here we would have had more buses to get the people out - and for the most part, more people would have taken them. People in Canada aren't attached to their property the way that Americans are. We tend to follow instruction from the authorities with more ease than our neighbours to the south. I once read a study that interviewed university students in both Canada and the U.S. They asked if they trusted their respected governments. The canadians answered "yes" as if this was a stupid question. The americans answered "no" with the same attitude. I know that may seem like a bit of a stretch, but the attitude does effect how people as a whole react to these situations - if you don't trust the authorities when all is calm in the world, why would you when all hell breaks loose? I don't doubt for a minute that all would not go smoothly if this had happened in Canada - we wouldn't leave on an evacuation order holding hands, and skipping down the street. But I think, for the most part, we would leave. And in leaving, wouldn't have had the problems of the Superdome - a cage in the middle of a lake.

Just my thoughts...