Septembers Blog? A little rant regarding the predominant media's hijack of a perfectly good and useful word: "victim".

It's a great word in itself because it is designed to get our attention and compel us to take unusual steps to help someone in genuine need.

These days, however, it seems as if everyone is some sort of victim. I'm not even sure its possible to LIVE in the United States without some conferred status of victimhood, and according to the media it is definitely impossible to thrive apart from such status.

With the two hurricanes I noticed that the word was once more being used in an emotional fashion to compel "viewers" to feel some form of emotion, and consequently, divest themselves of their hard-earned money to alleviate the suffering of all the "victims".

To be sure, there were a lot of genuine victims in the hurricanes that needed a lot of help. I'm thinking of the elderly, the infirmed, the mentally unstable, and even the pets. Sometimes i find myself worrying more about defenseless animals than I do about people and have to remind myself people are created in God's image and therefore deserve our attention more than animals. But I digress.

After the media coverage of hurricane Katrina a hard lump of cynicism began forming in my throat. The devastation was awful but i began objecting to the use of the ever-present word "victimization" at hand. Many of the people that I observed on television were anything BUT victims.

A mandatory evacuation was ordered for a good reason. New Orleans lies below sea level, and the city was susceptible to widespread flooding due primarily to insufficient and ancient retainer levees on the lake. The hurricane itself would cause devastation in the city of New Orleans but the resultant flooding from inadequate engineering preparation would be far worse.

Despite the warnings and dire predictions thousands of people refused to leave the city and travel a mere forty miles to safety. Within a few days many of these "victims" had to be rescued by other people who were thrown into harms way in many cases needlessly. It began to strike me that many of the real victims of hurricane Katrina were rescue workers being forced back into a dangerous situation.

I felt terrible when I saw images of young children without proper food and water and shelter and concluded that the children were definitely victims in the truest sense of the word. But contrary to the media reports, I found myself wondering who had victimized them? Was it the President or the PARENTS of the children?

Time and time again footage revealed young mothers with multiple children who had not evacuated the city and I began to understand why they had not left as it became obvious that these mothers had no husband to provide for the desperate needs of the children. According to statistics many of these mothers were dependent upon the federal government to provide for their children. Their husbands were nowhere in sight.

The storm happened to strike exactly one day before the issuance of monthly welfare checks...and consequently.....many of the young mothers had no money left to try to leave town, no husband to protect them from dangerous and violent packs of looters roaming the city, and were unable to go out and attempt to find resources and make changes in their immediate situation because they were alone in trying to stay with their children in order to protect them.

There were a lot of victims in hurricane Katrina to be sure. But there were a lot of people who were NOT victims as well.

When an individual makes a series of decisions over a period of time, they are building a destiny along the way. And no man-made government can insulate them from the outcome of the consequences of those decisions.

It is human nature to blame other people and government for our own problems, but we found out that government cannot protect us from everything. It cannot protect us from victimizing ourselves. Only we can do that.