The blame game

Yes, it has begun in earnest…the blame game, that is. It started early in the week here in San Diego, as questions were raised about why water carrying aircraft were not in the air immediately after the wildfires began.

Excuses were offered. The first was that California Fire officials could not just let any and all aircraft take wing without supervision. That description makes sense until closer questioning exposed that “supervision” meant only approved CalFire persons were qualified to be aboard these flights, even though the military equipment and personnel offered had been trained to fight fires in conditions much worse than that faced by the civilian firefighters.

Another blame game concerned the casualty count. Some local conservative radio personalities have argued that the reason so few people died in these wildfire evacuations – relative to those asked to evacuate before Katrina – was that these Californians took personal responsibility for their actions. When asked to evacuate, they packed up and left. Katrina victims, in their argument, refused to take the personal responsibility to evacuate because they were acculturated to wait for the government to do any/everything for them. When the government did not physically arrive to remove them from their homes, the hurricane’s flooding overtook them while they waited for someone else to solve their problem.

Missing from their equations, of course, were the socioeconomic differences present in these two populations. If one lives in the suburbs of a major city, it is usually the case that one has transportation to allow for the commute to a job in the city. If one lives in the inner city, it is usually the case that one depends on mass transit as owning a car can be quite an expense in city settings. It is also the case that in inner cities, poor people are often shunted to areas that do not get much attention by the city, i.e. areas close to factories and other not so desirable locations such as those surrounded by levees!

My bigger question is this; why did this blame game need to be started? I cannot fathom a reason other than a need to draw comparisons on a racial basis. In all the TV coverage I saw this week, none of the wildfire victims interviewed were African American.