So, now that the water has mostly receded and it turns out the Rita didn't deliver the "two" punch to Katrina's "one", some of the dust (well, maybe mud) is beginning to settle. And guess what? It's beginning to look like post-Katrina NOLA wasn't such an atrocity exhibition after all. This counts as good news, I suppose...
I'm sure that some bad things happened, more of them than should have. And a lot of horrible stuff probably didn't get reported officially- the locals don't trust the cops or the city government. Still, it no longer looks like the behavioral sink that was originally reported.
Why the wild exaggeration? The phenomenon is in some part understandable, and even forgiveable. After all, it was an extraordinarily messy situation by anyone's lights; everyone knows how easy it is to blow things out of proportion, to misinterpret what you see. The same event gets reported multiple times, details get abraded and lost as rumors fly. It's part of the human condition.
But parts of the article made me grit my teeth, nonetheless- not the writer's fault, but the content...
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