My sister is safe. Just wanted ya’ll to know ’cause you’ve been so good to all of us, to our city and its people. She and her boyfriend swam to a boat, and are now in a hospital in Donaldsonville. I don’t know how in the hell they managed to get there when so many others are stranded. BTW, my sister has the blondest hair that is natural. I’m throwing our race in as food for thought.
This man says it better than my tired ass can say it right now. Excuse the typos:
Notes From Inside New Orleans
by Jordan Flaherty
Friday, September 2, 2005
I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was
staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to
examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of
hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps. In the
refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people
(at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal
barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard
over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot,
state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush
for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once
inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them –
Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if
you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and
a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it
passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in
Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up,
they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.
I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army
workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no
one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they
would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of
journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any
information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and
all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an
unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me as someone
who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give
you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to be here at
night.” There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp
to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to
get on buses, a way to register contact information or find family members,
special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for
possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can. To understand this
tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself. For those who have not
lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. A
place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70%
African-American city where resistance to white supremecy has supported a
generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and
hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and
red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music
and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world. It is
a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two
hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a
community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended
families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal
goverments that have abdicated their responsibilty for the public welfare. It
is a city where someone you walk past on the street not only asks how you are,
they wait for an answer.
It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New
Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders
this year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black,
neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don’t need to
search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the
attacker is shot in revenge. There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and
distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the N.O. Police Department. In
recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug running to
corruption to theft. In seperate incidents, two New Orleans police officers
were recently charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several
high profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard
Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months.
The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will
not graduate in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per
child’’s education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher
salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out
of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school
on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved
in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm
labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city
where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient,
insecure jobs in the service economy.
Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is
one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane
Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and
corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the
refugees to the the media portayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by
race. Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this
week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As
hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to “Pray the hurricane
down” to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane,
we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping
for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer.
As rumors and panic began to rule, there was no source of solid dependable
information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level
would rise another 12 feet – instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like
wildfire, and the politicians and media only made it worse. While the rich
escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left
behind.
Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week
demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people
in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me
deeply. No sane person should classify someone who takes food from
indefinitely closed stores in a desperate, starving city as a
“looter,” but thats just what the media did over and over again.
Sherrifs and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of
perform rescue operations. Images of New Orleans’ hurricane-ravaged
population were transformed into black, out-of-control, criminals. As if
taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a
greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions
of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just
as the eighties focus on welfare queens” and “super-predators”
obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams
and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a
scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.
City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at
least the mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New
Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week’s events, was more about
politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the
danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the
money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city.
While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and
put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush
administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New
Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes
as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines,
the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of
our elected leaders. The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the
elections of both a US President and a Governor, and ushered in the southern
populist politics of Huey Long. In the coming months, billions of dollars will
likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be spent to usher in a New
Deal” for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs,
new schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be
“rebuilt and revitalized” to a shell of its former self, with newer
hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former
neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs. Long before Katrina, New
Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment,
de-industrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina
hurricane will take billions to repair. Now that the money is flowing in, and
the world’s eyes are focused on Katrina, its vital that progressive-minded
people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding with justice. New
Orleans is a special place, and we need to fight for its
rebirth.
Jordan Flaherty is an editor of Left Turn Magazine (www.leftturn.org)
