The beauty of the forwarded, quasi-anonymous email

Received a forward of a forward of a forward of a forward from a friend this morning juxtaposing the response to flooding in Iowa to the response following Hurricane Katrina. I'll copy and paste the original email text here. The subject line is "Iowa disaster":

Half the state is under water and I have yet to see any footage of people looting beer, TV’s or anything else for that matter.  Nobody is shooting at the people that are trying to rescue them.  Nobody is bitching about the food, the temporary shelters, or is hollering on TV that they need some crack. A levy broke in Cedar Rapids and nobody has accused the President of blowing it up.  Rather than sitting on their backsides with their hands out people seem to be trying to take care of themselves and most of them are actually helping others.  What a novel idea.  

I mean seriously!  What's wrong with those mid-westerners?  Why would you spend all day piling up sandbags to keep the water out of your house when there is all kinds of stuff to be looted? I think that Governor Culver of Iowa needs to call upon New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin or former Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco for some advice on how to handle this situation.

That just means there ain't shit worth looting in Iowa.

Thanks to you and your special ladyfriend for sharing that thinly veiled racist rant. How enlightened its author must be, especially because it makes perfect sense to compare your garden-variety flooding with Hurricane Katrina.

Oh, and when people in the Big Easy "were sitting on their backsides with their hands out," it's because they had been sitting at the Convention Center with no food or water for days, surrounded by feces and rotting corpses. Their hands were out because they were praying and pleading for anyone to come pick them up and get them the hell out of there. 

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think putting up sandbags was going to do much to help at that point. Nor would have putting up sandbags before Katrina made landfall done much to stop the surge off the Gulf, either. But who needs to ponder such an inconvenient truth when it's so much easier to point and say, "Look at the lawless, lazy black people? They're so silly! And we're so much better than them!"

Fuck off, Tim. Not surprised your from Virginia.