My Uncle Israel Chideya was missing for a while, lost in the maelstrom of post-Katrina evacuations from New Orleans. Well, we found him. He is good…and mad.
Here’s just a snippet of what he told me.
He had bought a multi-unit apartment complex in the french quarter. He didn’t evauate for the hurricane, but did once the levee broke and the floodwaters started rising. He and twenty thousand other folks ended up at the convention center, and he spent five datys in the place where (like the Superdome) children were raped, people were murdered, and even the elderly were harassed. “Elderly people from nursing homes were dumped at the Convention Center in their diapers.” And another thing pissed him off: although some of the elderly were dying and the children were getting sick, the first people evacuated were the prisoners. “I don’t have anything against people who are incarcerated,” he said, “But they should have taken the sick, the elderly, and children first.”
Uncle Israel took two elderly couples under his wing. One couple was blind. He shephereded them through the evacuation. They were taken by bus to Baton Rouge, then loaded onto military transport planes at the airport.
They werent told where they were going, but ended up in San Antonio, Texas. They were taken to the coliseum and the American Center, all of the evacuees. My uncle was worried about a repeat of the Convention Center fiasco. And then he noticed something. “All of a sudden we don’t see any white people,” he said. All of the white evacuees had mysteriously disappeared.
He asked a volunteering priest what had happened. The priest told him that local hotels were being paid to take evacuees. The white evacuees were told about the hotels. The black ones, says my uncle, were not.
I guess I should add a comment here, but I just finished watching an interview with the doctor who was ordered to stop saving a woman’s life by a representative of the Washington warlords, and then he described the expectancy room where people were put to die. A priest he said, raised hell and got 4 out, gave them some water, they are fine.
Damn… just. Damn.
Related somewhat, but if you are interested in hearing an interview with Barbara who is trying to work with the survivors of Katrina in Slidell(conducted by ePMedia Podcaster Kay Shepherd) it’s here at this link:
ePluribus Media Podcast Interview
You may have all seen Barbara’s diary at Dkos, but if not, for background, it’s here: [UPDATE]NEWS FROM SLIDEL-Human suffering…will it ever end for the victims
Thank you ductape. I checked out the link and I hope everyone here will read the whole blog and do what this man asks in his posts.
blueneck — how are ya’ll doing? Are people getting the help they need where you are? You and your family are ok?
Hi brinnaine! Thanks for asking. We are getting back to normal pretty much here in Jackson, except for all the extra people in town. My family and circle of friends are all fine, as I don’t have folks on the coast.
I do still have a sixty foot tall tree laying in my backyard. Professional help for tree removal is in short supply, and since my tree isn’t in my house, I’ll be happy to wait another few weeks to get the professionals in to do the job.
I’m kind of upset that I haven’t been able to do any volunteering to help out the less fortunate. I’ve had a slipped disk in my neck that acted up, probably from the stress and nerves surrounding the hurricane itself and the lack of electricity for several days. My family also caught a summer head cold last week and I’m just coming out of that funk, too. It’s funny how the stress built up during the storm and its aftermath and then released days after the direct personal effects of the hurricane were over.
As for the relief efforts in general, I understand that along the MS coast, the relief efforts still suck. What with FEMA sending all the ice to Idaho, the locals are depending on regular folks to make daily runs from Mobile, AL with ice and supplies. I haven’t heard of any actual deaths due to dehydration or exposure lately, but the situation is still pretty tough for lots of folks down there…
Take good care of that neck — stress-related reactions are always a signal from your body that you need to tend to yourself.
I can understand that you want to get out there and help (I would be the same way) but there will be plenty to do for a long long time, so do not feel bad about it!
Reading Olivia’s diary today that they are getting ready to BURN food that was sent by the British has me raging this morning….
Ok I am gonna scream now- maybe they will hear me in TX.
Let’s all scream in unison and improve our chances. ARGH!
We are going to hear more and more of these victim’s stories as time passes. What I would give to be a journalist right now. I would be down there in the shelters interviewing like crazy. I would be along the Miss. coast where Fema is AWOL because the longer these people are left out to hang the madder they are going to get.
Now they have Rita on the way and I would lay 1000 to 1 odds the levees are not going to hold up and we will see a repeat of three weeks ago.
Tragically, I doubt our illustrious establishment media will address this story.
afaid you will be right.
Compassionate Conservatism in action. God help them.
That would explain why we are only seeing white evacuees on the local news here in PA…what an outrage!
Welcome to America. Where all men are created equal.
3/5ths of the time anyway….
I think we are up to 4/5’s these days. There is hope. If bushie boy hands over the 40 acres and a mule (i hear cut backs are forcing him to only hand over the mule) then we might go from 4/5’s to 7/10’s.
tinkleon economics dontchaknow
This was on the BBC
A British couple told how the National Guard signaled to them in the Superdome to get out. They had grouped together with other tourist and to not look obvious they crept out to a designated areas in twos… the crowd caught on to the last of them and started throwing things at them.
I have read there is no confirmation of all the children and adults who were “raped” at the convention center. This is sounding like folklore. I mean this is the press justifying it’s prejudice toward black people. There may have been rapings and killings. But I have heard 23 murders and some hundred rapes. This is bullshit.
The guardian of Londom looked into this and found no confrimation that these events took place from eyewitnesses. It probably passed like a rumor througout the Convention Center and people believed it and then it makes for good story.
I’ll bet this is all an exaggeration. I am getting sick of hearing about it. Unless you can point to factual information…not about one rape or one murder. I don’t think it’s such a good idea to mention it without qualifying it.
She has expressed the hope that any investigation of the shelterpit aspect of the Katrina operation will exclude eyewitnesses who would only be motivated by the agenda of inciting anti-government sentiment.
Oddly, she has collected some strange bedfellows from the right lite that US has instead of a left, who feel that to imply that anyone who is poor and probably black might rape or murder anybody only incites those who are more comfortable with their racism to greater zeal.
The reality is that there have been independent, consistent reports of horrific crimes in both the SuperDome and the Convention Center since the days when the people were trapped in there. The reports come mostly from eyewitnesses, there have been a couple of law enforcement and National Guard acknowledgments.
Another reality is that any time you have a group of several thousand people, of any ethnicity, some will probably be criminals. Others will be people with emotional and mental disorders, maybe under normal circumstances controlled by medication, but here they are without their medication. Some will have substance dependencies, and here they are without their substances. Some will be elderly, infirm, children, people who are easy prey for those who whether due to illness or criminality, are given access to them.
Yet another reality: there were law enforcement personnel present, and National Guard, who either chose or had orders not to protect the weak or disarm the armed.
Of course now it is an academic point, the dead are dead, and if they had any family members to seek redress for them, they would be less likely to be dead, and the public made its choice already, but for discussion purposes, the benefits of confronting exactly what decisions were made by authorities and officials on various levels must be weighed against the benefits of insisting that unlike any other group of twenty thousand or so people, a group of twenty thousand or so poor people of color from the ninth ward will contain 100% law abiding, drug free upstanding citizens with excellent mental health.
For what it’s worth is in this thread and this comment.
You’re setting up a false choice here, Ductape. Logical fallacies 101. One doesn’t have to believe something as nonsensical as “like any other group of twenty thousand or so people, a group of twenty thousand or so poor people of color from the ninth ward will contain 100% law abiding, drug free upstanding citizens with excellent mental health to be concerned about the effects of the endless hysterical OMG they’re lootingkillingrapingshootingcarjacking!!!! TV coverage will have on the public perception of who the people were still in New Orleans after the storm are, and how it will stigmatize them in far too many people’s eyes for years to come.
The important thing is to prevent any nice white folks from asking how come all these good and decent folks came to be locked up with murderers and rapists.
If you locked up that many decent and good white affluent folks with white murderers and rapists, if there were upper middle class white women calling in to CNN to tell of a little girl’s ankles being broken by a gang of white drugged up sexual predators, and a little 13 year old white girl found dead in the bathroom after being raped for 4 hours by the same band of white predators, I think you know as well as I do that within the hour, there would have been some kind of action taken that removed vulnerable from the dangerous, and a bigger howl since school desegregation in Alabama.
That public perception you refer to existed and exists quite independently of recent events, CNN, even mass media itself.
Without a long history of that public perception of certain people as not quite human, 300 million people, including members of the target group itself, the operation could not have taken place at all.
Let me refer you to another diary (not mine)
Marked on the Breast with a Red-Hot Iron
about it for the sake of argument…
There is a bourgeois sentiment in America that abhors any breakdown in order. Looting and wanton rape by any group of individuals will tend to lead to calls for martial law and mass executions, plus new and more lethal security fences in the suburbs.
Our only underclass, with enough concentration to organize and be seen on TV, is our urban underclass.
And our urban underclass is largely black and hispanic. So, whether it is the MLK riots, or OJ, or marauding Puerto-Ricans wilding in Central Park, our experience with a breakdown in order is associatied with people of color.
Racism is a big part of it, but rich people will get nervous and call for fascist reprisals anytime large groups of people fail to pay for bottled water.
collateral damage in Mississippi.
I guess they figure, if you want to make an omelette…
have there been credible examples of rape and widespread looting in Mississippi? Weren’t the communities effected in Mississippi largely black too? Or actually a mix, but that area of Mississippi is racially mixed.
The fact is that the communities were not densely populated enough to allow for quality television coverage of large groups of people “misbehaving”.
I don’t see a racial component or lack thereof to the coverage of Mississippi. I just see a lack of footage.
Like New Orleans, most folks in the little towns in Mississippi who to this day have received nothing, and continue dying as I write this, are poor.
They are not all black, in fact some of those little towns are mostly poor white people.
Acceptable collateral damage.
our experience with a breakdown in order is associatied with people of color.
but why is that? middle and upper class whites are also regularly involved in a breakdown in order. several times a year we see sports related riots. mostly college aged men, mostly white, setting fires, tipping over cars, sexually harrassing and abusing women and girls in their path.
but those disruptions are chalked up to emotionally charged youngsters. those college kids are so irrepressible!
Of course I can. I was hardly saying that the racist corruption of our country was created a few weeks ago by CNN. But just because that abomination has been going on for 300 years doesn’t mean that I can’t hold the TV news industry accountable for fanning the flames of that deep-down white fear of Black people that continues to perpetuate that rottenness.
just how deep down it is, and whether it requires CNN or anyone else to fan it.