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Wow! Those article pieces have it right on the nose. The other night I caught just a piece (that was all I could stand) of Wall Street Week on PBS, which is one of the most arch Right Wing Conservative Talking Heads program going. They were still speaking in Malthusian terms of economic and social survival of the fittest, and laughed while saying how "the liberals are going to use this (Katrina) to try to bring back the New Deal." Yes! How funny!!! HA! HA! HA! Imagine that! I also just finished reading Charles Dickens "Hard Times" and see how little has changed in these kind of attitudes in a century and a half.
Had to post this!



This first hand report from New Orleans last week was received today from a friend; it is so powerful and honest I think the members of this listserv will want to know this. Phil Olson

Sept 5, 2005

Fwd by Phil Gasper:

Two friends of mine--paramedics attending a conference--were trapped in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. This is their eyewitness report. PG

Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences by Larry Bradshaw, Lorrie Beth Slonsky

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.

The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the "victims" of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.

Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded. Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.

On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived at the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement".

We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowd cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."

We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot.

Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts. Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in. Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people. From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water. Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.

We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.
Unbelievable. Imagine being fired upon as you are trying to walk out. I have one question: were these health workers black?

It reminds me of Daniel DeFoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year 1666" when the people trying to escape the plague were murdered by the outlying villagers who feared the disease.

-------

Update a day later: 3 laboratory rats with the bubonic plague have escaped from their cage in Newark, New Jersey.
Last edited by S'tan
Published on Thursday, September 8, 2005 by the Wall Street Journal
Old-Line Families Escape Worst of Flood And Plot the Future
by Christopher Cooper

NEW ORLEANS - On a sultry morning earlier this week, Ashton O'Dwyer stepped out of his home on this city's grandest street and made a beeline for his neighbor's pool. Wearing nothing but a pair of blue swim trunks and carrying two milk jugs, he drew enough pool water to flush the toilet in his home.

The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there have scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white and more affluent areas, streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators. Yesterday, officials reiterated that all residents must leave New Orleans, but it's still unclear how far they will go to enforce the order.

The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city's Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city's rich -- and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. O'Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By yesterday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor's pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline.

Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.

More than a few people in Uptown, the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Ave., have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s. High society is still dominated by these old-line families, represented today by prominent figures such as former New Orleans Board of Trade President Thomas Westfeldt; Richard Freeman, scion of the family that long owned the city's Coca-Cola bottling plant; and William Boatner Reily, owner of a Louisiana coffee company. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of "krewes," groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi Gras. In recent years, the city's most powerful business circles have expanded to include some newcomers and non-whites, such as Mayor Ray Nagin, the former Cox Communications executive elected in 2002.

A few blocks from Mr. O'Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community known as Audubon Place, is the home of James Reiss, descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.

He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.

The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

Not every white business leader or prominent family supports that view. Some black leaders and their allies in New Orleans fear that it boils down to preventing large numbers of blacks from returning to the city and eliminating the African-American voting majority. Rep. William Jefferson, a sharecropper's son who was educated at Harvard and is currently serving his eighth term in Congress, points out that the evacuees from New Orleans already have been spread out across many states far from their old home and won't be able to afford to return. "This is an example of poor people forced to make choices because they don't have the money to do otherwise," Mr. Jefferson says.

Calvin Fayard, a wealthy white plaintiffs' lawyer who lives near Mr. O'Dwyer, says the mass evacuation could turn a Democratic stronghold into a Republican one. Mr. Fayard, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser, says tampering with the city's demographics means tampering with its unique culture and shouldn't be done. "People can't survive a year temporarily -- they'll go somewhere, get a job and never come back," he says.

Mr. Reiss acknowledges that shrinking parts of the city occupied by hardscrabble neighborhoods would inevitably result in fewer poor and African-American residents. But he says the electoral balance of the city wouldn't change significantly and that the business elite isn't trying to reverse the last 30 years of black political control. "We understand that African Americans have had a great deal of influence on the history of New Orleans," he says.

A key question will be the position of Mr. Nagin, who was elected with the support of the city's business leadership. He couldn't be reached yesterday. Mr. Reiss says the mayor suggested the Dallas meeting and will likely attend when he goes there to visit his evacuated family

Black politicians have controlled City Hall here since the late 1970s, but the wealthy white families of New Orleans have never been fully eclipsed. Stuffing campaign coffers with donations, these families dominate the city's professional and executive classes, including the white-shoe law firms, engineering offices, and local shipping companies. White voters often act as a swing bloc, propelling blacks or Creoles into the city's top political jobs. That was the case with Mr. Nagin, who defeated another African American to win the mayoral election in 2002.

Creoles, as many mixed-race residents of New Orleans call themselves, dominate the city's white-collar and government ranks and tend to ally themselves with white voters on issues such as crime and education, while sharing many of the same social concerns as African-American voters. Though the flooding took a toll on many Creole neighborhoods, it's likely that Creoles will return to the city in fairly large numbers, since many of them have the means to do so.
We need to pool funds, charter some trasnportation and take a whole contingent.

The hurrican was just the beginning. There will now be years of human degradation, unchecked corporate profiteering, a massive struggle to keep the underclass out of the 'new' New Orleans on the part of the overclass, a free-for-all of curruption -a kind of Wild West of depredations.
Oh my apologies first, dear friends and Mboarders - I have not been so absent here in any month since we went live over four years ago.

This topic has just MOVED from the VERSAILLES ROOM forum to GOT ISSUES forum, as the many issues raised by the hurricane and its continuing dramas will probably keep us posting for months if not years to come.

Here are a few updates:

MY BROTHER

My brother Dave returned home to the Marigny Saturday after 5 weeks of exile in Shreveport, Houston and then Dallas (re-evacuated for Rita). And somehow, with Leo luck (and/or the collective spirits of "the ancestors" that a Voodoo priest noted to inhabit the back of his house), his ramshackle yet gorgeous dwelling at Frankin and Royal was untouched - not a window broken, nothing. Even his collection of Haitian art, gathered over 30 years, was bone-dry.

Thanks to all who have sent beams on his behalf, written or called.

His best friend Ron, who he evacuated with, did not have such a happy homecoming. He already knew that his mother's house in the old Desire neighborhood had flooded and was not salvageable, but went back to see if any of her memntos had survived upstairs. He opened the door to her house and found the bodies of two dead looters in the living room, some of his mom's meager possessions nearby. They had been dead for a long time.

The story of Ron and his family was chronicled recently, here:

http://www.al.com/weather/hurricane/mobileregister/inde...321114680.xml&coll=3

Worth reading to remember how many of the elderly and working poor had NO options - how many other Lenora's didn't have a son to come pick them up from outside the 'hood?

POPPY Z. BRITE

One of my happiest NOLA memories was sharing a funny cigarette with Poppy and her husband (who was in full draggage) and various local vamps backstage at the first ENDLESS NIGHT VAMPYRE BALL back in 1998. Poppy's blog has been one of my must-reads for this whole ordeal, and it been's comforting to keep in touch vicariously this way. (Scroll back before her recent travels..)

http://www.livejournal.com/users/docbrite/

BEER LOOTER DUDE

The first site to really make me laugh since katrina..

http://www.weightlessdog.com/bld.nsf

MARDI GRAS

Got our ressies... see you there!
New Orleans Reborn: Theme Park vs. Cookie Cutter
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

NEW ORLEANS - Optimism is in short supply here. And as people begin to sift through the wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina, there is a creeping sense that the final blow has yet to be struck - one that will irrevocably blot out the city's past.

The first premonition arose when Mayor C. Ray Nagin announced that the model for rebirth would be a pseudo-suburban development in the Lower Garden District called River Garden. The very suggestion alarmed preservationists, who pictured the remaking of historic neighborhoods into soulless subdivisions served by big-box stores.

More recently, Mr. Nagin contemplated suspending the city's historic preservation laws to make New Orleans more inviting to developers - evoking the possibility of architectural havoc and untrammeled greed.

Read the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/arts/design/18futu.html?8hpib
i just went back to read some open letters from a friend of mine who has gone to help in the re-creation of new orleans. he's an amazing activist... passionate, energetic, true. just wanted to share his experiences with this community. they're very real.
**************************************

hello all-

I feel a pressing need to communicate something of the experience I am having here, even as I know I can only capture a glimpse of what it is to be here. I want to say something you have not heard, to offer some deep insight into the complexity of the situation here, but I don't even know where to begin.

I am in a surreal and deeply inspiring hell- New Orleans is a post apocalyptic wonderland where utter devastation is everywhere and all relationships of culture, race, society and politics are richly counter-intuitive, nuanced and have gone from backward before to upsidedown now. I am floored. No account of what is occurring here can be given without a brief review of the stunning reality on the ground. The scale and scope of the destruction is really not possible to grasp if you have not driven the streets here. There are over a hundred thousand cars that will never drive again that have yet to be moved- they are in all manner of disarray- on curbs, upside down, in front lawns and perhaps most eerily- parked right where they were left when their drivers suddenly fled more than 3 months ago. There are currently 1.3 million households from the Gulf Coast still residing elsewhere. Bodies are still found every day. Vast areas sit festering, powerlines strewn across streets, trees sliced right through houses, two story homes crushed to the height of their front door. Tens of thousands of homes are filled with rotting furniture, warped floors and swollen drywall.

Our bus and van arrived with 22 people at the brand new Common Ground Community Center just opened in the Upper 9th Ward district of New Orleans. We parked the bus behind a locked gate and set to helping establish this church complex as a housing, feeding and staging center for the growing network of CG volunteers arriving and leaving daily from all over the country. The organizing phenomenon that is the Common Ground Collective is an incredible sight to see. Common Ground was born the week following the hurricane, by a group of courageous locals and their regional activist allies who initially armed themselves to defend black neighborhoods from roving white vigilantes who were shooting at young black men. Out of that warzone atmosphere has grown an organic crisis response team that has diversified and grown extremely quickly into a sophisticated organization with over a half dozen semi-permanent locations and 30-some programs ranging from health care clinics, distribution centers, a pirate radio station, legal advocacy teams, and now house gutting crews.

I have spent the last two days working with one of these crews on a house in the Lower 9th Ward. We've been working on the home of a 77 year old woman named Mable who has lived in her neighborhood all of her life, and in this house for 25 years. We are working in a crew of a half dozen folks, outfitted in Tyvek suits, industrial respirators, boot covers, work gloves etc- removing furniture and appliances, pulling down drywall, and piling it all in a trash heap in the street out front. Yesterday we finished gutting her entire house, and today we returned to spray a bleach solution on everything that remains and scrub it with brushes to kill the ubiquitous black mold. Black mold and bleach. Nasty and toxic. But the satisfaction comes in realizing that the house is structurally sound, and she will be able to return, if the government allows her. She is healthy, articulate and a prominent community figure. She has begun to give speeches to the community praising Common Ground and has offered us the use of her house for a year.

The overt and entrenched racism of local, state and federal government is outrageous, maddening and impossible to overstate. There are literally neighborhoods side by side with the same level of damage and the white ones are being cleaned, power is back and they are being given trailers to live in on their lot while they rebuild. Next door, literally, in the black areas it looks like it did the day the water receded- no lights, no clean up, no people. There is a systematic effort to rid this city of its majority black residents- and the extraordinarily blatant manner the government is able to get away with it on a daily basis is bitterly heinous. They are working to pass a law to make it illegal to gut houses or help residents repair their homes in areas the city deems condemned and will use imminent domain to give pennies on the dollar to homeowners and forcibly give title of their property to developers. Everything is in upheaval and in addition to the weight of futility in the face of the massive scale of damage is the nervous uncertainty that hangs over the future of this city. Competing models of recovery are articulating themselves as they accelerate towards a possible head on collision that could be very, very ugly. Is it a national model of neighbor helping neighbor, local groups funded and empowered to respond to the needs and wishes of residents? Or is it a top-down, corporate profit driven decree imposed on an already suffering and oppressed people through economic apartheid and brutal state violence? Both visions are actively evolving and I choose not to be a pessimist even if the signs are not good.

Adding absurdity to insanity is the juxtaposition of areas like the French Quarter and Downtown to the outlying areas. Businesses and restaurants in these areas are largely open and a crew of us have been partying in smoky bars in the french quarters each night since we've been here. I am sleep deprived, contaminated inside and out and a little strung out- but there is a real way in which it is all quite normal feeling. There is an electricity in the air- like we have been waiting for this, like it is just the beginning. Bill McKibben said of the situation, in the context of global warming, that "New Orleans does not look like the America we know- but it looks very much like the world we will inhabit for the rest of our lives". . . I am afraid he is spot-on. As 9-11 was a watershed moment in global history, signaling a permanent change in our relationship to our government and the direction of our collective future, so too is this the end and the start of an era of historical proportions. What happens here relates to our national identity, to the possibility of healing the deep wounds of racism and class inequality in our lives, and to the role of the federal government in empowering or oppressing its citizens.

I have seen countless convoys of military police, police officers from LA, New York and else where, corporate mercenaries on contract from Blackwater and on and on and on, but I have yet to see a single FEMA official in the city of New Orleans. Halliburton is being paid $3000 a house on a no bid contract to put tarps on leaky roofs, while the homeless and destitute owners and residents of those homes are shunned. . . I could go on like that for a long while, telling tales that outrage and frustrate, but depression and anger are not what I want to convey- because truly that is not the way it feels to be here. This city is vibrant, and its people are amazing. Our daily interactions are poignant and intimate- there is a raw humanity on display here that is heartening and affirming. I am tearing up right now just thinking of the passionate people I have met since I've been here- it inspires the desire to drop everything else and stay indefinitely- which many have done.

This is only the beginning- I am just barely starting to wrap my comprehension around the dynamics of this strange and unique place- a place that feels viscerally familiar and completely foreign all at once, all the time. It is oddly comfortable and intensely challenging to be here. Stay tuned and i will try to write more soon. Tomorrow is a rally and march for the Right to Return movement and then I think we will go south to Houma for a day or two. . . .huge love to y'all. . . . . .solidarity,,,,,Laurel
letter #2, dec. 14
*************************

hello all-

I feel a pressing need to communicate something of the experience I am having here, even as I know I can only capture a glimpse of what it is to be here. I want to say something you have not heard, to offer some deep insight into the complexity of the situation here, but I don't even know where to begin.

I am in a surreal and deeply inspiring hell- New Orleans is a post apocalyptic wonderland where utter devastation is everywhere and all relationships of culture, race, society and politics are richly counter-intuitive, nuanced and have gone from backward before to upsidedown now. I am floored. No account of what is occurring here can be given without a brief review of the stunning reality on the ground. The scale and scope of the destruction is really not possible to grasp if you have not driven the streets here. There are over a hundred thousand cars that will never drive again that have yet to be moved- they are in all manner of disarray- on curbs, upside down, in front lawns and perhaps most eerily- parked right where they were left when their drivers suddenly fled more than 3 months ago. There are currently 1.3 million households from the Gulf Coast still residing elsewhere. Bodies are still found every day. Vast areas sit festering, powerlines strewn across streets, trees sliced right through houses, two story homes crushed to the height of their front door. Tens of thousands of homes are filled with rotting furniture, warped floors and swollen drywall.

Our bus and van arrived with 22 people at the brand new Common Ground Community Center just opened in the Upper 9th Ward district of New Orleans. We parked the bus behind a locked gate and set to helping establish this church complex as a housing, feeding and staging center for the growing network of CG volunteers arriving and leaving daily from all over the country. The organizing phenomenon that is the Common Ground Collective is an incredible sight to see. Common Ground was born the week following the hurricane, by a group of courageous locals and their regional activist allies who initially armed themselves to defend black neighborhoods from roving white vigilantes who were shooting at young black men. Out of that warzone atmosphere has grown an organic crisis response team that has diversified and grown extremely quickly into a sophisticated organization with over a half dozen semi-permanent locations and 30-some programs ranging from health care clinics, distribution centers, a pirate radio station, legal advocacy teams, and now house gutting crews.

I have spent the last two days working with one of these crews on a house in the Lower 9th Ward. We've been working on the home of a 77 year old woman named Mable who has lived in her neighborhood all of her life, and in this house for 25 years. We are working in a crew of a half dozen folks, outfitted in Tyvek suits, industrial respirators, boot covers, work gloves etc- removing furniture and appliances, pulling down drywall, and piling it all in a trash heap in the street out front. Yesterday we finished gutting her entire house, and today we returned to spray a bleach solution on everything that remains and scrub it with brushes to kill the ubiquitous black mold. Black mold and bleach. Nasty and toxic. But the satisfaction comes in realizing that the house is structurally sound, and she will be able to return, if the government allows her. She is healthy, articulate and a prominent community figure. She has begun to give speeches to the community praising Common Ground and has offered us the use of her house for a year.

The overt and entrenched racism of local, state and federal government is outrageous, maddening and impossible to overstate. There are literally neighborhoods side by side with the same level of damage and the white ones are being cleaned, power is back and they are being given trailers to live in on their lot while they rebuild. Next door, literally, in the black areas it looks like it did the day the water receded- no lights, no clean up, no people. There is a systematic effort to rid this city of its majority black residents- and the extraordinarily blatant manner the government is able to get away with it on a daily basis is bitterly heinous. They are working to pass a law to make it illegal to gut houses or help residents repair their homes in areas the city deems condemned and will use imminent domain to give pennies on the dollar to homeowners and forcibly give title of their property to developers. Everything is in upheaval and in addition to the weight of futility in the face of the massive scale of damage is the nervous uncertainty that hangs over the future of this city. Competing models of recovery are articulating themselves as they accelerate towards a possible head on collision that could be very, very ugly. Is it a national model of neighbor helping neighbor, local groups funded and empowered to respond to the needs and wishes of residents? Or is it a top-down, corporate profit driven decree imposed on an already suffering and oppressed people through economic apartheid and brutal state violence? Both visions are actively evolving and I choose not to be a pessimist even if the signs are not good.

Adding absurdity to insanity is the juxtaposition of areas like the French Quarter and Downtown to the outlying areas. Businesses and restaurants in these areas are largely open and a crew of us have been partying in smoky bars in the french quarters each night since we've been here. I am sleep deprived, contaminated inside and out and a little strung out- but there is a real way in which it is all quite normal feeling. There is an electricity in the air- like we have been waiting for this, like it is just the beginning. Bill McKibben said of the situation, in the context of global warming, that "New Orleans does not look like the America we know- but it looks very much like the world we will inhabit for the rest of our lives". . . I am afraid he is spot-on. As 9-11 was a watershed moment in global history, signaling a permanent change in our relationship to our government and the direction of our collective future, so too is this the end and the start of an era of historical proportions. What happens here relates to our national identity, to the possibility of healing the deep wounds of racism and class inequality in our lives, and to the role of the federal government in empowering or oppressing its citizens.

I have seen countless convoys of military police, police officers from LA, New York and else where, corporate mercenaries on contract from Blackwater and on and on and on, but I have yet to see a single FEMA official in the city of New Orleans. Halliburton is being paid $3000 a house on a no bid contract to put tarps on leaky roofs, while the homeless and destitute owners and residents of those homes are shunned. . . I could go on like that for a long while, telling tales that outrage and frustrate, but depression and anger are not what I want to convey- because truly that is not the way it feels to be here. This city is vibrant, and its people are amazing. Our daily interactions are poignant and intimate- there is a raw humanity on display here that is heartening and affirming. I am tearing up right now just thinking of the passionate people I have met since I've been here- it inspires the desire to drop everything else and stay indefinitely- which many have done.

This is only the beginning- I am just barely starting to wrap my comprehension around the dynamics of this strange and unique place- a place that feels viscerally familiar and completely foreign all at once, all the time. It is oddly comfortable and intensely challenging to be here. Stay tuned and i will try to write more soon. Tomorrow is a rally and march for the Right to Return movement and then I think we will go south to Houma for a day or two. . . .huge love to y'all. . . . . .solidarity,,,,,Laurel
I will be closing this topic a few days after today's Katrina anniversary, as well as the pre-Katrina "Postcards from New Orleans" topic in Elsewhere.

Your thoughts on this anniversary are welcome, I myself am quite numb.

Our last trip to New orleans was a month ago.
It was a special trip because we got to deliver the last costume for the theater project we've been doing in St. Bernard Parish in person. Johnny and I went to meet the entire SHINE PRESENTS troupe for happy hour at Molly's on the Market.

Like so many people who have "adopted" people, families, groups and neighborhoods across the Gulf, we had never met this troupe face to face, only corresponded via email. I had always heard how warm and wonderful St. Bernard people were, but had never met a whole group together - they were BIG in both stature and personality! Despite their incredible losses, they had been entertaining people in "The Parish" since December, when they did a Christmas show for the relief workers/first responders on a ship docked in Violet, La.

One of the two directors of SHINE is 60 year old Rose Marie, who lost her home and production place, and a few months after the storm, her husband of forty years. She sent me this letter last night - I thought I'd share parts of it here, just one story among hundreds of thousands:

quote:

Dear Chi Chi

I'm wearing my beautiful new red dress! Okay, I"m really just trying it on in my apartment and typing to you while wearing it, then I will change into shorts for my busy day, but I just wanted to tell you thank you and how much I appreciate your thoughtfullness...

And Will wore the red cape for the show last night, and also slept under it in the RV that night as well. We did a show in Lacombe, La., and tonight we have a show in our hometown of Chalmette, in fact it's in Chalmette High School. This is the place we've been rehearsing, and its also the evacuation shelter where I met my husband in 1965 (when we both evacuated for Betsey), and where in Katrina many lives were saved.

We have our beautiful RV, tried it out this weekend in a park near Lacombe, and after the show tonight we'll start packing up and getting ready to move out this weekend... Saturday night, we had a band named the Pettibones sit in for us, and they did a song "Thank you for being a friend" and we all sang the chorus, at the end of the show. It was one of those moments, ya know?

My husband's sister was there, along with several friends I haven't seen since Katrina... It was almost too intense for me. I don't think, Chi Chi, that most widows would find telling their story 6 months into widowhood to be a good thing. I cry every night when I get offstage from my monologue, but by the end of the show I'm smiling again. Theatre....it's real and it's affording me a chance to save lots of money on therapy.

Anyway, I love the dress and scarf and thank you for thinking of me.

Love ya, Rose

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