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.