> Speak for yourself. This attitude is exactly why local responses fail. So in one breath you criticize me for being a cynic, and in the next you admit that my

> Speak for yourself. This attitude is exactly why local responses fail. So in one breath you criticize me for being a cynic, and in the next you admit that my cynical attitude is prevalent enough to be the root cause of the bad things I said would happen as a result? I never claimed it was a good attitude, I claimed that it was the dominant one. Most people can be relied on to be selfish in stressful situations. Are there instances where we all come together during trying times and help each other and do the whole inspirational humanity thing? Sure. But these situations are inspirational because they're not the norm. We should expect people to exhibit the typical attitude rather than the ideal one when designing our national disaster response policy. > outside capital and support can help, but alone will not lead to their sustainability and growth. This is plainly false. There are hundreds of counter examples all over the world, both today and throughout history. China, in spite of their other faults, has been doing this with multiple cities a year since the 90s, dragging tens of millions of people out of poverty in the process. For these investments to work, they need to be sustained -- you can't turn the spigot on and off every four years. They need to be real investments, and sized appropriately -- lip service doesn't work. And it usually takes the better part of a generation for the improvements to materialize. > Every step of the way, people come and join the community chasing social and economic reasons to join the community. Now this is fantasy. Are you not aware of how many of the black communities in the South came to be, or why they ended up so impoverished? It didn't go anything like this. First we dragged people here against their will on slave ships. This lasted for 300 years. Then we ended slavery, but the slavers and their descendants were bitter about losing the war and had deeply held ideas about race, so they worked diligently to prevent the black community from prospering as a matter of policy via violence, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, redlining, unbalanced enforcement, etc. plenty of which continues to this day. This is not lack of investment or lack of personal motivation, this is active sabotage. These communities are poor because they started out with nothing, and we've been curbstomping them for over a century. > Some communities just don't have the core nugget of what is necessary to make it worth rendering aid This is such a ridiculous take. These communities don't have what it takes? They weren't given the chance. Every time something good happened there, we came in and took it away. The main issue I have with your original comment is that you're basically telling people in these communities -- people who can barely afford to keep a roof over their head, let alone save for hurricane preparations or for a big move -- "Gee, you should have planned better for this hurricane," "Gee, if you can't plan better, maybe you should get up and move," "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, mate." The majority of the communities at the receiving end of the now annual hurricane are black and poor, and we are the reason they've been too poor to do any of that. Your comment is a tone-deaf slap in the face, and you are being rightly excoriated for it.