And The Bigots Played On

Rebecca Hagelin asks why the poor don't have the courtesy to shut up and drown, like the underclass passengers in steerage on the Titanic did.

Hagelin can't help but think -- if you can call it that -- "that if the tragic natural disaster in New Orleans had occurred in a culture that had daily practiced the Golden Rule, rather than the Gangsta Rot, we would have seen more scenes of neighbors helping neighbors and far fewer scenes of neighbors preying upon neighbors." That never would have happened on the Titanic, Hagelin huffs:

The harsh reality that dreadful day in 1912 is that most of the passengers would die, and they knew it. Yet, amid the panic and impending doom, the accounts of survivors remind us of a time when civility and honor were more important to many than survival itself.

So how is that in fewer than 100 years we have digressed to [sic] a society where, when disaster strikes, the story is marked by a display of the worst side of human nature rather than the best?

How is it? Perhaps because you and your story are full of shit, that's how.

On the Titanic:

The orders, if they came at all, were sent down to the lower decks after most of the lifeboats with less than capacity had left. By that time and the fate of these people were sealed. They were basically left to shift for themselves. Some managed to save themselves, but most just milled around helplessly about in their quarters-ignored, neglected, forgotten.

There were some Third Class passengers that did not wait for White Star personnel to escort them. They struck out on their own and faced many locked entry ways and gates. The myriad of hallways and stairs in Titanic made the trip from steerage to the boat deck an almost insurmountable challenge. Any entrance through First Class was met with locked doors or a White Star crew member that refused entrance. Some of the more resourceful third class passengers crawled along the crane from the well deck aft while others climbed vertical ladders to escape the well deck forward.

Sound familiar, Becky?

And why not compare Katrina with history which is quite a bit more relevant, by the way? No gangsta rap in 1927 either.

I know this part of the Titanic story will ring a bell for you:

With this lost world went some of its prejudices-especially a firm and loudly voiced opinion of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon courage. All the brave and heroic passengers were white, English speaking people. While the ones that mobbed the lifeboats and pushed women and children out of the way were "Armenians", "Italian", or just "foreigners." Even when Harold Bride in his testimony, told about the man that broke into the radio room and tried to steal his life jacket, some newspapers made the man "Negro" for better effect. (Just as a sidelight, there were no African-Americans on board the Titanic.)

Sadly, those prejudices, and those loudly voiced opinions, haven't gone at all. They've just digressed to Townhall.com.