Update: If this makes you angry, go to this site and get the contact info for your Representatives and Senators. Then, contact them and ask them why these people, who have lost everything, are still getting screwed.
The New York Times has an article today about Katrina survivors who are still languishing in FEMA trailers two years after hurricane Katrina. That would be the hurricane where we watched as our government did little to help. I’m sure it’s just a startling and amazing coincidence that many of these people are Black.
Compounding the problem is that many of these people are yet again stranded, but at least the weather is better. The problems are exacerbated–unemployment, the grocery gap, and childcare. They lost their jobs because of the storm, or because they couldn’t get to them from the parks like Sugar Hill, where, if you do not own a car, you are screwed. The bus comes four times a week, and the supermarket is only within walking distance if you can walk eighteen miles and eat only dried food. You cannot get to jobs from these parks on the scant public transport, and if you have dependents and no access to care for them (or access to nearby relatives who can help), you cannot exactly leave for work anyway. Living right in New Orleans, most people had no need of a car (and thus found themselves stranded during the hurricane, and greeted with self-righteous lectures about how they should have gotten out, likely with magic fairy transport dust or something).
Because these folks were renters, they did not get grants to rebuild their homes. Their homes have not been rebuilt. I don’t understand why it’s acceptable for us to relegate them to lives that are the equivalent of being chained in a waiting room. I don’t understand why it’s okay for people to lecture and preach about hard work and sacrifice and how people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but it’s not okay for people who are trying to get jobs and rebuild their lives to get some reasonable help. Like, say, transportation. And housing.
But they aren’t wanted. They are too brown and too poor. The apartments and public housing where they lived are either gone or slated to be redeveloped. The rents for existing units have skyrocketed, and communities that have these FEMA communities are revoking permits for the trailers or allowing the zoning to expire. They are moving against any kind of assisted housing–including housing for the elderly–because of worries about crime. And when I say crime, I’m pretty sure the meaning is “Black people.”
“Affordable” apartments in New Orleans are affordable for people with a teacher or police officer’s wage, not a health care aide’s wage, or a maid’s wage, or a cashier’s wage. Not that it matters, because even though they want to work, and even though workers are needed, these workers, these Black workers, are apparently not what employers had in mind.
These are not people who fit the right-wing created boogeymen of welfare cheats and lazy whiners. But they are Black, and they are poor, and they apparently still don’t matter.
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I have to make the invariable “Devil’s Advocate� point: these people, most of whom are stuck side by side and in the same situation, could be forming child care and shopping coops. One or two individuals – say, trained daycare workers – could be watching the kids while others work.
At first, a designated someone could hop on the bus and haul back enough groceries to feed many more. As the residents accumulate income through working, they could hire a van to do the same.
The government did wrong by the people and continues to do wrong; you won’t get any argument from me. But based solely on the stories I read from people who want further help for Katrina victims, I have to wonder what those refugees are doing to help each other.
They don’t need the government. They can help dig each other out while giving Bush and his ill-trained cronies the collective finger.
We all could (and perhaps will) be in that situation someday. I would hate to think it would be much worse than needful merely because people failed to cooperate.
I guess it’d be crass to point out that, because the Katrina survivors are poor, and minorities, and well aware of just how badly the system is fucking them all, they *are* the bogeyman the right-wing is so goddamn afraid of. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t the phantoms the right-wing fabricated to feel good about screwing them; because the right-wing already sees them as welfare cheats and lazy whiners for the simple affront of being alive and not WASPs.
Well, except that if you’re a person with a severely mentally disabled brother who’s a grown man and a schizophrenic child (like one of the people in the story), you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who feels confident enough to help you. When you’re spending most of your time trying to get jobs so you can get some income, you aren’t around enough to do your share of collective assistance. And when you do get a job and are gone for most of the day for $6 an hour, you won’t have the time.
And people won’t be able to get to work to get money to pool if the public transportation is spotty and employers never return their calls. So it would be nice to alleviate the pressure through collective efforts, but it won’t guarantee anyone will change.
Shorter libertarians that will respond to this: If people didn’t want to live in trailers, they shouldn’t have been born/been black/been unable to stop a hurricane with their bare hands. They need to take personal responsibility, such as the had the foresight that your average libertarian had to be born into the white middle class.
Yessir. Up by your bootstraps! Hup ho, let’s go!
What nonsense.
I have to make the invariable “Devil’s Advocate� point: these people, most of whom are stuck side by side and in the same situation, could be forming child care and shopping coops. One or two individuals – say, trained daycare workers – could be watching the kids while others work.
That you think this isn’t happening says more about you than about them. That you think that’s going to make a big difference speaks more to your privilege than to their stupidity you blithely assume they must have.
Clearly, the government is NOT going to help these people. There are certainly enough wealthy people in this country that private charities could help with the right people running things. This sort of disregard for poor people (of all shades) really depresses me.
Patkin pretty much already said what I was just about to, but yeah. These two sentences can’t be simultaneously true.
Devil’s Advocate. Without visiting the trailer parks in question, but having lived six years of my life as a poverty stricken single mother, I can almost guarantee that the people in the trailer park are already doing those things you’ve suggested, to the best of their abilities. But when you have a trailer that can only fit four people in it, you can’t really watch ten of your neighbors’ children responsibly. If your car fits six people, you can’t take ten people to work. If your skills are geared to urban survival, living in rural isolation becomes another new challenge. If you add to all that the fact that they have moved from an area where black labor was (once) relatively welcomed to one where blacks are nearly universally unwelcomed, of course they’re going to have ongoing problems.
The problem is, that everyone in those trailer parks lacks bootstraps. It’s really nifty to say they need to get out, but there’s nowhere to go. Two years after Katrina, I still get migrants wandering into my homeless center from the Gulf Coast.
Mark:
Why don’t they, then?
I never claimed they didn’t. I said “…based solely on the stories I read from people who want further help for Katrina victims, I have to wonder what those refugees are doing to help each other.�
If they’re doing these things and no one who wants to help them is reporting on it, that causes me to wonder just who the real racists are in this situation.
Quoth the Libertarian: If they’re too stupid to help themselves, they can starve.
Quoth the Conservative: We, like, did everything in our power to help without “enabling� them.
Quoth the Liberal: If they’re too poor and black to help themselves, let us throw money at them. Oh, and if they actually are doing things to better their communities, we won’t report on such because then people might think Sugar Hill is a super place to live!
This government isn’t going to help them. It didn’t help them during the storm or in the immediate aftermath. It isn’t helping them now. And considering what a brazen liar and cheater Dumbya is, I’m gonna take a wild guess here and say help won’t be coming any time soon.
I never said collective effort would be an immediate panacea; I said they could dig each other out. And if they want better lives, they’re going to have to dig deep, because clearly the government that promised help is not going to deliver.
Just one example for the skeptics: http://commongroundrelief.org/
Besides, as the government said, it isn’t there to help the people. So why should we hold the government responsible for being completely amoral fucking filth, when the real fault lies with those poor minorities who haven’t remade their communities into palaces from the skin on their elbows and the sweat on their brow.
Fucking lazy Katrina survivors. It’s their own fault!
Why, we just don’t want to enable the poor people to survive the awful fucking place the government stuck them in at bare-minimum expense when that’s so not their job, when they’ve got billionaires to support and war to engage in.
God forbid a government help support its citizenry. Don’t they know that you just have to be born into a class of leisure and all their problems will be solved?
Hey Pat, if international embarrassment couldn’t cause the Bush administration to do its job in helping Katrina survivors, what the hell makes you think news reports and complaints from the disenfranchised are going to move them?
It isn’t as if refugees have a range of options, one of which is getting substantial aid from the US government. They have precisely two options, from what I can see: do something among themselves, because no one else will, or…don’t.
That’s it.
Well, DA, I think that instead of just accepting that our government won’t do what it should, we should pressure them to help. Resignation plus advice to people to dig themselves out equals more of the same bullshit.
“Why don’t they, then?”
I wish I knew.
Bush has a ridiculously low approval rating. He should have been impeached, like, six or seven times already. He has cost your economy untold billions, not to mention tens of thousands of lives (soldier and civilian) in Iraq.
He’s been the object of international censure; the subject of ridicule from every serious government watcher there is. He is, quite possibly, the worst president in US history.
His plans to stop terrorism have holes in them big enough to drive a truck full of explosives through.
He gives his friends preference in bidding for lucrative government contracts.
He’s been in “hot water� several times for appointing ill-trained cronies to positions of great importance, including the FEMA director who dropped the ball on Katrina.
The US government has done so much illegal and immoral over the last seven years. It has told so many lies and half truths. It has eroded so many rights. People have gotten together. They have applied pressure. The media has finally hopped aboard and started reporting the truth instead of admin spin.
How much good has it done so far?
But go ahead, Sheel; shoot the messenger.
Well, that’s a very well-reasoned point, DA. We can’t expect the government to perform its actual function anymore, so we must solve the situation ourselves. Since the government so obviously won’t do their job, I propose a new solution which the Katrina survivors can utilize to get some help for their situation.
Perhaps they should begin to die. In droves. Of their own volition.
Now, I know that seems harsh, but quite frankly, what are we to do? A government will not respond to the plight of its citizenry, and the only two choices available to those people then is to do something or not. Dying is, arguably, something to do that will get them out of their current situation. The ultimate in bootstrap-pullings.
In fact, for the simple irony of the act, perhaps we should privately collect bootstraps for the citizens to hang themselves with. Then the government, who can’t be expected to do anything, will no longer have to concern themselves with the people and get to the really, [i]really[/i] important work they’re no doubt doing in D.C.
And we can hold our heads up high and say:
Bless you America, land of the dead. May your government always stand free of pressure, and your people remain brave as they moulder in the open air.
Well, we won’t say it, because we’ll have all killed ourselves. But perhaps when Canada or Mexico takes the country over to bury the bodies, so they won’t stink up the continent, they’ll put up a plaque.
a designated someone could hop on the bus and haul back enough groceries to feed many more.
Clearly you’ve never grocery shopped without a car. Shopping for more than a few people is easy when you have a trunk and back seat to fill, and you’ve got wheels and an engine to power all that stuff back home. On the bus, you’re limited to what one person can carry and retain control of. I’m a healthy, strong, and able-bodied single person with only myself to feed, and I have a couple of big strong canvas shoulder bags to load up. Even then, I can really only get a week’s worth of groceries for one or two people home via public transportation. There’s no way I could shop for 20-30 other people (which is about the minimum that would be useful under such an arrangement).
I once lived in a group situation where there were 15 of us putting money in to do a costco run once a week — it took two people and the entire back and trunk of the car to get enough groceries to feed 15 people for a week, via costco (so the overal quantity of food was packaged more efficiently than it would if you went to a supermarket and had to buy 15 of everything). One week, the car broke down, and everyone had to fend for themselves because you just can’t send a couple of invididuals on the bus to bring back food for that many people.
On another note, an additional stress of having so many people still living in FEMA trailers is that trailers (especially the RV type FEMA distributed) don’t stand up very well to hurricanes. Meaning that every hurricane season you have Katrina refugees still living in trailers is another big risk of a major disaster. Katrina itself was somewhat of a freak occurrance (very strong hurricane hits a major city in the exact right way to bring about a worst case scenario). But smaller and less dangerous hurricanes hit the Louisiana coast all the time. People in permanent housing do fine in such semi-routine situations (this is one reason a lot of middle class people didn’t evacuate before Katrina), but people who live in trailers generally have their lives shattered. Every year the bulk of the poor population of NOLA live in FEMA trailers is another year you risk a second and even more embarrassing disaster.
So based solely on the stories you’ve read, you assumed that they must not have figured out something as basic as ask the neighbors to look after their kids. Fascinating. Has it occurred to you that it might actually be hopeless if no one helps them?
I’m visually impaired and cannot drive. Never could. I’ve hauled an assload of groceries home before, on my back, in the basket of a bike, in a shopping cart. I’ve carried for myself, for two people, for five people.
It sucks, but I’ve done it. And what’s more, I’ve seen other people do it as well. I’ve seen people tromp onto the bus with enough groceries to fill a big shopping cart.
And it’s hard if you don’t, but far from impossible.
In that case, I’d suggest you invest in a personal folding cart. You can also haul a lot more bags if you tie them front and back over your shoulders and around your waist. Heavy stuff on the inside – bread and lighter stuff on the outside.
One person for every three or four families could feasibly do it if he went two or three times a week.
The bus goes to Sugar Hill four times a week.
Like I said, it ain’t perfect, but it sure as hell beats, um, not eating.
You won’t get any argument on that from me. Their situation sucks.
The government should so something about it.
But it won’t.
Circumstance and mother nature have dealt the poor of New Orleans a tough hand, no doubt about it. Could the Federal Government have done more and done it faster? Probably. It’s not, however, a situation where people were given no help whatsoever. In many cases, the help that was received was either not used wisely or abused. The $2000 debit cards that FEMA handed out were used to purchase a lot of non-essential items (http://www.snopes.com/katrina/charity/debitcard.asp).
Compare the plight of the Katrina victims to that of Mexico’s poor. Mexicans risk life and limb on a perilous journey to cross desert or river with little more than the clothes on their back. They come to a foreign country, overcome a language barrier and somehow manage to find work, support themselves and send a large part of their earnings back to Mexico to support family members.
It would seem that the poor of New Orleans could profit from the Mexicans example.
I’ll believe that throwing money at problems isn’t useful when rich people stop solving, ameliorating, or allieviating their problems by throwing money at them…
I’m another one of these carless urban low-income unpeople, though (not as low-income as I used to be, but still on the low side of the regional median), so perhaps my sympathies are ideologically misplaced. That said, I’m pretty sure that the answer to the problem of the government not fulfilling its prescribed role is to replace the government with one that actually works rather than to attempt to take up its role in ways that don’t benefit from economies of scale and other efficiencies of large-scale collective action.
On the childcare front, I can pretty much guarantee that they’re already working out a system on that front. Even in my middle class Louisiana neighborhood, very few people paid a nanny or a daycare center for childcare. Instead, various stay at home moms would trade off, or an older childless woman would run an informal daycare center out of her home. This was the childcare I grew up with, and which is still the norm down there. So the idea that this wouldn’t have occurred to anyone living in a FEMA trailer is just preposterous.
Though, at the same time, the way that the storm scattered families and shattered established communities means that A) people can’t rely on relatives for chilcare, and B) the people living together in these FEMA communities probably aren’t the same people who’ve always lived in the same project or on the same 9th Ward block. So childcare probably is more of a hurdle than it used to be.
The main problem is not “how do we get together to provide childcare while we work”, but “how do we get jobs and have reliable ways of showing up at them day to day”. I also wonder if another issue about the ability to find jobs isn’t the fact that, in the aftermath of the hurricane, a lot of businesses that relied on unskilled service sector labor shut down, others replaced their employees relatively recently, and there’s also been an influx of newcomers flocking to take the jobs these people are prevented from getting to.
What’s really fascinating is how you assumed I ever thought that. I’m not talking about a couple of neighbors getting a small arrangement together; I’m talking about a community project.
There are no play areas and no security guards? WTF? How many unemployed people are living there that could fill in some time by doing these things?
And if people writing complementary stuff about Katrina refugees aren’t mentioning such initiatives, where would you suggest I find out about them?
Do you know of any? Because if you do, I’m genuinely interested in learning more.
No, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t. Strangely enough, it still doesn’t.
If I thought they were stupid, which is what you think I believe, only then would I think their situation is hopeless without help.
They have brains and hands. Their government is a useless piece of shit. They can pick the lesser of two evils.
“And it’s hard if you don’t, but far from impossible.”
anyone who suggests that it’s feasible to for one person to grocery shop on foot/public transportation for 30+ others (without repetitive stress injuries at the very least) is stupid, i’m sorry. or maybe just really entitled.
keep in mind that by “household”, we’re not talking about like one or two other people, but families of 5, 6, and more. if hauling groceries for 5 is feasible, but difficult, do you really think it’s possible for one person to carry groceries for 30? remembering, of course, that 30 people is probably just your family and 3 or 4 others. which does not approach the entire FEMA trailer park.
now, of course, it’s possible that you could get together a team of 6 or 7 big dudes, and figure out how to get carts and all that, and coordinate with the bus schedules, and possibly by doing that you could feed 50 people. well, ok. that’s very nice. but it still doesn’t even come close to solving the most basic problem of all — how to get money to buy the groceries in the first place, if you’re at the point where you’ve got 6 or 7 ablebodied men who have that kind of time to devote to the science of grocery shopping.
I don’t know where FEMA decided to relocate most Katrina survivors who depend on FEMA housing, but having grown up in the semi-rural South, I can tell you that working without a car is nearly impossible in most areas of the South that aren’t urban. Even poor people in rural areas have cars because public transport doesn’t exist. Even in areas that function as suburbs to cities (30-45 minute drive away), there is no public transport, and many people just go to the city to shop for anything other than groceries which cuts down on available jobs. This story needs to get more publicity because as it is many people literally believe that the aftermath of Katrina is over.
They have brains and hands. Their government is a useless piece of shit. They can pick the lesser of two evils.
And kill the government until somebody helps them?
Edgy! But still, I think it’s got potential.
“Three or four families� equals 30 people now?
Since we’re playing that “let’s assume everyone who disagrees with us is a privileged racist� game anyway, I have to ask just how many kids you think each refugee has, anyway?
You’re the one who came up with the number 30, not me. Go back through the posts. I said one person for every three or four families, two or three times a week.
Nope. Jobs and transportation to jobs would be great. I read the article, however, and one of the individuals featured in it mentioned how a lack of child care can cripple the job search more readily as poor transportation.
I’ve already talked about cooperative daycare. That could very well allow a percentage of currently unemployed people to work again.
Working people can better afford their own transportation and can then help other people reach work as well.
There are no play areas and no security guards? WTF? How many unemployed people are living there that could fill in some time by doing these things?
And who’s, exactly, going to pay them for doing this? Hm? It couldn’t be that they’ve got FUCKING BILLS TO PAY, and that all the security work in the world isn’t going to help you pay them if there’s literally no one in a position to pay you for your work.
I’m kinda surprised that people in the US, with all their talk of freedom, haven’t rebelled in any meaningful way. And I think having Katrina survivors put their government to shame would be a most excellent form of rebellion.
Direwolf, regarding the debit cards: Yes, quite a few people did probably use/abuse them mindlessly. Grocery store cards or vouchers spaced out on a weekly basis, along with some free clothing and shoes to replace what was destroyed, probably would have been a better idea than the debit cards. Nobody’s saying there aren’t poor people who have done it to themselves and made themselves more impoverished than necessary; obviously there are. But it’s a pretty big leap from there to saying, “None of these people deserves any help because a few of them are really stupid with money.”
They are UNEMPLOYED!!!! As in “not working at the moment.� They have FUCKING BILLS TO PAY regardless of how they spend their time UNEMPLOYED. They could VOLUNTEER to help the community out until they become NOT UNEMPLOYED.
Oh I know, only an over-privileged and entitled person would dare suggest that people without jobs have a little extra time for community-building.
/Yeah, I think that was pretty succinct and clear
I’m not talking about a couple of neighbors getting a small arrangement together; I’m talking about a community project.
Again, as stated, this is the default model of childcare for most families in the Louisiana I grew up in. To the extent that most of my fellow female transplants to the north can’t imagine staying to raise children, because in Louisiana your mom and sisters and cousins and friends and neighbors you’ve known since you were a baby are the people who are supposed to help look after your kid while you work, not some weird stranger or institution.
It’s virtually impossible that they don’t have this covered. And if they don’t, it’s due to community disruption and the dispersal of families in the aftermath of the storm, not because of laziness or dependence on the government.
Also, I think there’s a very basic point you’re missing here. The problem is not that FEMA trailer residents are starving in mass numbers because none of them can figure out how to get to a supermarket, or refusing jobs in mass numbers because there’s no childcare. Sugar Hill residents are undoubtedly coming up with makeshift solutions in order to survive. The problem is that the residents shouldn’t have to be doing this in the first place, and that we need to develop real life solutions (jobs, permanent housing, either functional public transit or resources in walking distance, etc.) rather than stand around shocked when barefoot people don’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
It’s pretty easy for me to believe that some kind of cooperative daycare is already happening. Why? Because it happens everywhere, and it probably happened with a lot of these people pre-Katrina. So the fact that we’re not seeing mainstream news stories about such arrangements isn’t an indication that the news is biased or that these arrangements aren’t happening–it’s an indication that such arrangements aren’t newsworthy (at least by our sensationalist standards for “news”).
I guess I just don’t understand how, in this day and age, people can still fathom making the “poor people just aren’t trying hard enough” argument.
Sure, maybe it’s possible for a single person to do grocery shopping for 3 or 4 other families. Based on the factors Sheelzebub lists in the original post, I don’t see that as a viable option–but let’s assume just for a second that it is. Just because a person could do this, why should she have to? Rather than giving hurricane victims advice on how best to survive under shitty conditions, wouldn’t it be better to instead make those conditions better?
““Three or four familiesâ€? equals 30 people now?”
I said three or four families in addition to your own.
And if you don’t think 4 or 5 families could be 30 people, you’ve never left the middle class enclaves of whichever major metropolis you live in.
I grew up in a family of 6, which included only my parents and four of us kids (which is a pretty average number of kids for down there), and was lucky enough not to need to take on any grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, etc.
Devil’s Advocate: “They are UNEMPLOYED!!!! As in “not working at the moment.â€? They have FUCKING BILLS TO PAY regardless of how they spend their time UNEMPLOYED. They could VOLUNTEER to help the community out until they become NOT UNEMPLOYED.”
I don’t mean to be condescending–really, I don’t–but are you aware of what it means to be unemployed? If you want to collect unemployment benefits, you have to prove that you’re actively seeking employment. Which usually means applying and interviewing, showing up for day labor opportunities, etc. Ditto if you’re not trying to collect but still trying to find a job. No matter how noble the spirit, this leaves very little time to volunteer. Particularly if you have your own childcare to consider.
Devil’s Advocate, I suppose you’re aware that it is illegal to care for more than four children who are not your own in your home in most states. Also, since the fema trailers don’t have room for your proposed daycare, where would you propose they set one up, and in an environment where the landlords are already getting ready to let usage leases expire, how do you propose they get the zoning board to build one?
I think one of the things you’re missing here is that not only is the (Federal and State) government not helping these guys, but the (local and county and State) government is actively hindering them. Putting them on a plot of land 18 miles from anywhere with once in and once out a day transportation only four days a week practically guarantees that most of those people will be unable to get jobs. In addition, they were moved “temporarily” into areas actively hostile to their presence and itching for them to go away. Without relocation into more appropriate settings with opportunity for jobs, decent transportation, and a safer childcare network, it is unlikely these people will go anywhere.
Direwolf, unlike the people of Mexico, the survivors of hurricane Katrina were divided up with their social systems and families split and scattered. There is no one to leave your kids with while you wander away to find work. Those who are young and healthy and unattached have already left for the cities, but they may very well not know where their families are to send money back to. In addition, despite the “brown menace” trend among American racists, most would still rather hire a Mexican under the table than pay an African American.
Again and again. if the government is not only not giving you bootstraps, but is actively taking them away, there’s no “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”.
(I don’t post here, but I do lurk!)
Funny how this turns into “they” [who should be doing something but are not, inexplicably–I mean, I’m sure that if I lost my home and my neighborhood and was living in a crappy trailer in what must be terrible weather conditions I’d be totally ready to rise! up!] versus “the government” [which is ipso facto crappy and can’t be trusted, but also mysteriously can’t be replaced].
What about, you know, us? We have some money; we have the ability to pressure our government and to support organizing efforts among Katrina refugees; we have the ability to make a media stink about this (just as this blog post is doing). It seems a bit premature of the hard-working, bike-riding Devil’s Advocate to write off not only government assistance but any kind of left-wing assistance as well.
Did I once cite laziness?
I never accused them of being lazy. What I am saying, to clarify so there is no further misunderstanding, is this: it has been two years and the cavalry has yet to come. I don’t think they’re ever going to get they help they were promised.
That is an injustice.
They can either remain “in storage� and waiting for the help to which they are entitled, or they can get together and start hashing out some community-wide plans. If they haven’t already, they can elect people to lobby on their behalf.
Insteaf os speaking as many voices, they can speak as one.
They’re still waiting. It’s time they stopped waiting.
I love it! I dared question the merits of their continuing to wait, and suddenly I think they don’t know how to shop or accept job offers.
You’re not arguing with me; you’re arguing with a vague caricature of my point.
No, they shouldn’t be treated like this. They don’t deserve to be shit all over by the very people who swore to help them.
But they are.
And unless you have some plan for how to make your government do something right for a change, I’d say my idea is more tenable.
They have to get past the shock of what happened to them, and start planning.
They don’t need the government. They can help dig each other
That’s what government in a constitutional democracy is–people working together to help each other. It’s everyone’s responsibility to get the government we have working–it’s not the responsibility of people in trouble to invent a new government for the occasion.
They could VOLUNTEER to help the community out until they become NOT UNEMPLOYED.
And how do they when they’re ‘volunteering’ all their time to secure the community?
How do the people in charge of ‘cooperative daycare’ get their employing, paying jobs if they’re day-caring the whole time?
How do the people who work have the time to ferry these other two service-volunteers to job interviews, get their own work done, ferry the interviewees back to the community and deal with their own shit, when they know that while the security-volunteers are gone, their shit could get broken into, or while the daycare-volunteers are gone, the children are fucking rudderless?
Or is part of “bootstrap-pulling” expecting the entire community to work three times harder to break bare-minimum while holding any other force as useless and unresponsible for anything that happens?
If it’s any comfort, I don’t believe you’re an entitled racist, DA. I believe you’re probably a contrary prick, but there’s tons of those in the world.
You are a disenfranchised black woman – a senior citizen with a grade nine education. You have been waiting for two years in a flimsy little FEMA trailer for the government, which promised help, to deliver on its word.
But nothing has happened. For two years, you have been ignored and maligned. For two years, you have sat in one stage of shock or another that your life is now gone – that everything you value was swept away by a storm, and that your own government cares so little about you that it has warehoused you to be forgotten.
You, however, are blessed with a skill: you’d been a cook for fifty years, and know how to plan large menus. And after two years – two long, grueling years – you decide to use your superior planning skills to form a working group that develops and implements a grocery pick-up schedule. Some people are skeptical at first, but you all get together and hammer out a useful plan. You do it.
The next time some media types come to your trailer park, they see not hopeless people, but people with a plan: “Yes, we can certainly use your help – and look how we will use it. We’ve already developed a community here, and use those funds for the following projects…�
But no. It’s much better to sit around in despair because you’re surrounded by people who “want to help� but “just don’t know how.�
They could VOLUNTEER to help the community out until they become NOT UNEMPLOYED.
And if they spend their time volunteering, they’re not out applying for jobs, thus lessening their chances of getting employed.
Do you know what I did when I lost my job? I spent all day, every day, looking for another one. Much like the folks in this article are doing.
You’re assuming that no one is volunteering, and trying to deflect the subject by complaining that no news article is covering whatever communal efforts they may be making. But recall: this article is about the continuing (non) response of our government in the face of a disaster.
Neither, but thanks for playing this “attack the person rather than the argument� game. It was much more fun that merely complaining about how refugees are treated with out a single useful idea on how to change it.
In the interest of putting my money where my mouth is, does anyone here have any good Katrina-related charities (especially any that could help out the Sugar Hill folks in particular) to recommend? I’m not usually one to ask others to do my research for me, but I’m sort of at a loss for how to go about searching for legit organizations where my tiny donation could really help.
Also, DA, are you sharing your words of advice with the people who could really use them (if, indeed, the people of New Orleans haven’t figured out on their own that they need to start planning) or just with those of us who have the internet access and the time to peruse liberal blogs? As I mentioned above I’m interested in charitable giving and I plan to start getting in contact with my own representatives tonight. You seem disgusted with our government’s inaction and convinced that the situation won’t change anytime soon–so are you content with that?
You know what I did when I lost my job? I spent part of every day looking for another one, and another part of the day bulking up my resume with volunteer activities.
Some of these people have been wearing through the soles of their feet looking for jobs for two years. Something tells me that volunteerism isn’t going to hurt their chances of finding work at this point.
I haven’t seen any evidence in this article or any other I have read that people are engaged in community building or volunteerism. I’m not deflecting; I’m openly criticizing.
The Katrina survivors want the help to which they’re entitled. They’re not going to get it. This article was useless, though I’m sure the reporter who penned it felt nobler for having done so.
THANK YOU.
Jesus H. Christ, some people are tools!
“You, however, are blessed with a skill: you’d been a cook for fifty years, and know how to plan large menus. And after two years – two long, grueling years – you decide to use your superior planning skills to form a working group that develops and implements a grocery pick-up schedule.”
1. Cooks without high school diplomas generally are not at the management level of running a restaurant. Someone who’d spent 50 years as a cook would have the expertise to cook the food brought back by such a system, perhaps (and this would probably be a pretty valuable skill). But such a person would be terribly unlikely to have experience at running a restaurant, or even of developing menus (that would be a head chef or owner/gm, depending on the type of restaurant). Even if you had been head chef and in charge of developing the menu, that would enable you, perhaps, to do a pretty good job of figuring out what to do with the raw ingredients once they arrived.
2. Even if your example was “you’d spent 50 years as a back-of-house manager”, restaurants have established systems for acquiring food. Most of it, in fact, is delivered directly by the supplier. A restaurant manager will be responsible for developing relationships with vendors, but she will probably not have the expertise to figure out, from scratch and without any real resources, how to actually acquire food. Not to mention that restaurants are businesses that generally have a bare minimum of capital: if for some reason the supplier flakes, they can send the line cooks out to costco to pick up enough eggs to get them through one brunch, and deal with the fact that a few customers might be annoyed when they show up late and eggs benedict are 86-ed already.
This, in fact, is a key underlying problem with your “invisible bootstraps” idea: most of it would take a hell of a lot of management experience and capital. which is something poor people are almost guaranteed to be kept away from. if you’re a line cook in a restaurant, you know how to do just a few very specialized kitchen tasks. you don’t know how to run a restaurant. and you especially don’t know how to run a restaurant with none of the usual resources a restaurant has.
if you spend a few centuries creating a class of people who are to be kept out of management positions, and given virtually no access to capital, you cannot be surprised when, left to their own devices and with zero resources, there’s just nothing they can do.
I dunno, DA. I would propose that getting the government to actually do their fucking job instead of resigning yourself to the idea that they’re fucking useless is a pretty useful idea.
You never know, it’s been tried before.
Talking about what other people ought to do isn’t going to get us[people reading this blog] doing what we need to be doing to help the folks who are suffering.
People are only going to work to build the institutions that make communities if they want to stay for the long term. If they want to leave for greener pastures, they won’t invest time and energy in the here and now unless it gets them closer to elsewhere.
Putting aside for a moment that my own activities are entirely irrelevant to the merits of my argument, I share plenty of time and planning services with people here in my city who need it. I don’t live in the US. I don’t have lots of money.
I’ve seen the good community-based projects can do.
Tonight???
Oh totally. That’s why I suggested community planning; because people languishing in storage is a contenting thought.
Get…out…of…my…mind!
Let me know how I can help. But remember - tsk, tsk - this post was about government inactivity.
@ mk — i have a feeling your best bet would be the local church congregations, which have been a major source of community organizing and resource sharing down there.
Then go do it. How long do you suppose it’s going to take? ‘Cause theKatrina survivors have already been waiting two years.
Welcome to the club, Mr. “The goverment is evil; let’s bitch some more about it on the internet and hope that changes them after seven years.”
Yes, drones. Mindless victims of a system they can’t ever hope to subvert. I understand.
But hey, at least the some liberals are around to save them from themselves.
I haven’t seen any evidence in this article or any other I have read that people are engaged in community building or volunteerism. I’m not deflecting; I’m openly criticizing.
You’re trying to make it about the (in)action of the people and/or the neglect of the media to report on this phenomenon.
I spent part of every day looking for another one, and another part of the day bulking up my resume with volunteer activities.
Most places that hire service personnel don’t give a rat’s ass about how much you volunteer. Christ, I tried that route, and it got me nothing besides lectures about how I should spend my time looking for something that pays.
This article was useless, though I’m sure the reporter who penned it felt nobler for having done so.
I doubt both points very much. The article has pissed a lot of people off and hopefully, the government will be embarrassed into action and people will be moved to contact their representatives–here’s a snazzy website that can get everyone the information double-quick.
Cute crack about the reporter feeling ‘noble.’ I suppose it beats feeling superior to those folks who just aren’t doing anything to help themselves, eh?
The government did wrong by the people and continues to do wrong; you won’t get any argument from me. But based solely on the stories I read from people who want further help for Katrina victims, I have to wonder what those refugees are doing to help each other.
[…]
And if people writing complementary stuff about Katrina refugees aren’t mentioning such initiatives, where would you suggest I find out about them?
First of all, the story was about how the Katrina refugees need help, not about what wonderful “bootstrappers” they are. “Complimenting” the refugees on their community initiatives was not the focus of this piece.
Second, this kind of argument sounds amazingly like the “abortion for people I approve of” arguments: basically, that people have to demonstrate their virtue and responsibility to “earn” needed help, and if I personally don’t approve of their actions up to this point, then they just don’t “deserve” help.
How about “they deserve help because all their worldly possessions and means of livelihood were completely and utterly destroyed in the worst natural disaster in US history”? Or “they have earned the right to get help because they are still trying to work and not turning to crime”? Or “maybe we should help them because their government screwed them over and insurance companies screwed them over and government contractors screwed them over, and good lord, how many times must these people get screwed before someone says, ‘Enough!’ ”
Maybe we should help them because they are people, and they need help. Isn’t that enough to “deserve” help?
DA, I suggest you put your money where your mouth is and do something. You’re happy to lecture everyone on what they should do. If you’re so sure, go do something to help.
I’ve posted a link where people can get in touch with their representatives. Yes, our government sucks. It will continue to suck if folks just accept the status quo and shrug off this crap.
Yes, drones. Mindless victims of a system they can’t ever hope to subvert. I understand.
But hey, at least the some liberals are around to save them from themselves.
Yes, hapless people who refuse to do what’s needed to dig each other out. Lazy people who just wait for government to help them. I understand.
But hey, at least we’ve got someone here to tell them exactly what they should do and judge them.
(And don’t give me the crap that golly, you haven’t called anyone lazy or bad. You’ve been insinuating it all over your posts.)
Thanks, opoponax- that was my thought too, since churches were coming up pretty frequently as I was trying to search out info on childcare in Nola.
Yeah, DA, tonight. You got me- I’m totally willing to admit that I have thus far done jack shit to help anyone in New Orleans. Like the National Guard, I should’ve arrived sooner. No argument there.
My point is that you’re proposing an idea (specific community initiatives, which, as other commenters have pointed out, are probably already happening) to a group of people who aren’t living in FEMA trailers. Your suggestions so far have been entirely aimed at the victims themselves rather than those of us who could be helping the victims, and I just don’t see how they’re going to get your message. I certainly admire you for helping out people in your own city, and I can certainly appreciate not having the money to contribute to another.
I guess I just have a problem with the tone of your comments–you seem to be saying that the initial article, the post and the comment thread here are all worthless. So how are your comments any better?
“Shorter libertarians that will respond to this: If people didn’t want to live in trailers, they shouldn’t have been born/been black/been unable to stop a hurricane with their bare hands. They need to take personal responsibility, such as the had the foresight that your average libertarian had to be born into the white middle class.”
This is pure BS. If people who don’t speak a lick of english can crawl across the desert, get jobs and survive in the U.S., these people can help themselves as well.
Drive by most construction sites in this country. What to you see? Teams of Mexicans slinging bricks for 10 hours a day in the heat for a basic wage. Why don’t you see any blacks at these sites? Because liberal apologists like you have been excusing blacks and giving them handouts for going on 40 years now. Your “compassion” has destroyed an entire generation of blacks. The people in those trailers can’t fend for themselves because they’ve never been asked to.
.
.
So people should just STFU? Really, what is your point? You seem to be saying that because the Bush administration doesn’t give a shit, then the rest of us shouldn’t, either–that gross the neglect of Katrina survivors isn’t even worthy of discussion. Is that really what you mean to say?
[…] Katrinatowns Sheelzebub over at Pandagon has an excellent and passionate response to this N.Y. Times article about the massive trailer parks still housing Katrina victims, which were designed for the convenience of no one but the lowest bid contractors. […]
Why don’t you see any blacks at these sites?
Because contractors won’t hire them, because they are US citizens who speak English and know enough to expect a living wage.
Because if they started congregating in the parking lot of Home Depot trying to hustle work, the manager would call the cops and get them arrested on vagrancy charges.
Because they live 20 miles from any job site and have no transportation even to a day labor hiring point.
Because you’re speaking in generalizations, plenty of African Americans work in construction.
I don’t live in the US, Sheel; if they won’t listen to you, why would they hear me? I write MY government. (Many First Nations people have been living in crappy trailers on government reserves here for years.)
No, you don’t understand. You haven’t once addressed my argument – only the right-wing straw-bogeyman you wish it were.
Insinuating? So you can read stuff into my posts that I didn’t even put there, then argue against what you think I hide between the lines rather than against what I actually say.
What an amazing talent.
I am aiming my suggestions at the survivors themselves not because I think they’ve done something wrong, but because I have absolutely no reason to believe that the people around them are going to do something right.
I’m suggesting they do it themselves because I don’t think anyone else is really going to help them.
If I were them, after two years, I’d be pretty damned convinced that no one would help me. If they aren’t planning, they should be; because they have already been screwed over enough.
I was in New Orleans this past summer. Driving through, we saw that the government was hard at work planting trees in traffic medians near the convention center. Not two blocks away, there was a social services office; it was boarded up. The hospital that services that area had still not reopened its emergency room.
We drove through my uncle’s neighborhood, and you would have thought the hurricane happened weeks ago, not a year ago. Fallen trees, buckled streets, twisted signs. It was eerily quiet, but occasionally we would hear the sounds of people repairing and rebuilding.
When we went to our work site, the national guard was hard at work patrolling the empty neighborhoods in armored vehicles, stopping only to park in front of our work site and stare at the volunteers.
What then would you have the people do? Staff their own emergency rooms? Work their own social work cases? I worked side by side with people who had lost everything, and they were there helping someone else get a fresh start. It’s certainly not the survivors that haven’t done enough.
Bootstraps are way overrated.
You’re being disingenuous here. If that is what I meant to say, that is what I would have said.
What is with people and always trying to get to the rotten subtext regardless of whether it’s really there or not?
Yeah, DA, the same way people say ‘welfare queen’ . Your subtext is offensively clear; they’re just not trying hard enough.
What makes me sad — Sugar Hill is located in Convent, LA, which is less than 50 miles from my hometown.
MK, I’d guess the place to start would be historically black denominations in Convent, as well as in the surrounding communities like Vacherie, Donaldsonville, Thibodaux, Labadieville, and Napoleonville.
The catholic diocese that covers Convent is the Diocese of Baton Rouge, which has its own branch of Catholic Charities — I’m not sure what the politics of this are, in terms of which dioceses are actively helping, and which are middle class/white dominated and turning a blind eye to this whole thing. There is a very strong incentive for the white communities dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, and especially the race and class ramifications, to just go all ostrich in the sand (especially if they’ve been the subject of possible negative reports in the national media — this just gets the whitefolks defensive, unfortunately).
The Diocese has a ministry for Black Catholics located in Convent itself, interestingly enough — their number is 225-562-3255, and the director is Deacon Alfred A. Adams.
Here are some Baptist churches listed for Convent, LA, with phone numbers:
Pleasant Hill Baptist (225) 562-3487
Phillipian Baptist (225) 562-7366
Pilgrim Baptist (225) 562-7593
The catholic parish serving Convent is St. Michael’s: (225) 562-3549
DA, it’s not that hard to say “Oh, really? That’s what people think I was saying? My bad- here’s what I meant.” Instead, you’ve chosen to call anyone who has misinterpeted your argument (and there have been several of us, so it’s just one person who took the things you’ve said the wrong way) disingenuous. You’ve called the NYT piece worthless, you’ve expressed your opinion that appealing to the US government is never going to work, and you’ve accused us of doing nothing but bitching on the internet. This is not a misinterpretation of your words. I can quote you if you’d like.
I don’t believe that, Ginmar; but somehow the good people at Pandagon have a better understanding of my secret, evil motives than I do.
They can’t see the forest for all those pesky trees in the way.
(Oh, and opoponax- you rock! Copied all that in an email to myself so I can check it out later. I’m a little squeamish about Catholic Charities in general, largely due to the adoption mess here in MA, but your help is greatly appreciated.)
You are being disingenuous by turning a criticism of governmental handling of the survivors into a referendum on how they ought to be helping themselves. Whether or not they are helping themselves–and you have provided no proof that they are not–is irrelevant to the fact that they were and are being royally screwed by the Bush administration. The help that was promised to them, and that they have every right to expect, has never materialized. Now if you have a master plan for how survivors can better help themselves, great, but that’s a different topic. By bringing it up, you are derailing the discussion.
What is it with people who think it’s their divine right to change the subject? As for your rotten sub-text, I don’t think there was anything sub about it.
No, you don’t understand. You haven’t once addressed my argument
I’ve address your argument plenty, as has everyone else here. “To address” is not synonymous with “to agree”
Might I also point out that if you’re going to bitch and moan about how I’m assuming how you feel about the Katrina survivors, you’d do well to reread your posts and check the tone? You’re free to use whatever tone you want, granted, and you’re free to give us all lectures about What You Would Do and What Those People Should Do If Only They Would Stop Sitting On Their Butts And Wait For The Government To Save Them, but don’t be surprised if people, well, don’t agree and find it rather self-righteous and ignorant.
While you’re at it, look at the quote I pulled above my snark that got you so offended. Pot, meet kettle.
yeah, while i can’t speak directly about any one particular branch of Catholic Charities, a lot of reasons cause me to think they’re not the first place you should go in this situation.
actually, the first person I’d call is Deacon Adams — if he’s black, and he’s doing any kind of community outreach at all, and he really lives/works in Convent, he’ll have heard about Sugar Hill. And if he’s a decent human being, he’ll know about ways you can help.
You’re being disingenuous here. If that is what I meant to say, that is what I would have said.
I am genuinely curious what your point is. Armed rebellion against a government that controls our military will last exactly how long?
The fact that these people haven’t starved to death in the two years since Katrina suggests that they’ve enacted any number of Devil’s Advocate’s ideas. The problem is, that that is now the way of life. It’s treading water; survival.
The government is not rebuilding homes, so there is nowhere else to go. Moving is expensive.
The government is, however, enforcing all the laws that wouuld keep poor black people corraled into a shantytown.
This is not simple government inaction. Remember the police barracade on the bridge, sending the people back to the Superdome. The surrounding communities are deliberately confounding the ability of these people to help themselves.
1) I said exactly what I meant. I just didn’t say all this other shit people like to attach to my argument. If you want to interpret my arguments in the worst possible light so that you can further a political agenda of your own, be my guest. You’re three quarters of the way there already.
2) The fact the majority here agrees with you does not make you right - either about the solution to the refugees’ needs, or about my argument itself.
3) Some of you are being disingenuous, deliberately mischaracterizing my argument in an effort to defeat it without having to think beyond your own well-worn talking points.
4) The NYT piece is worthless. The NYT piece is worthless. The NYT piece IS WORTHLESS. Quote me on that all you like. Again: The NYT piece is worthless.
5) Some of you are bitching on the internet, even while asking me what I have done besides bitch on the internet. I think mine is a fair characterization and I stand by it.
And while you’re quoting me, how’s about pointing out where I used the term “lazyâ€? to describe Katrina survivors, where I let some deeply closeted racism of mine slip out, where I claimed they should “lift themselves up by their bootstrapsâ€?, where I said one guy could haul enough food to feed 30 people, and all of the other garbage attributed to me that doesn’t actually appear in any of my posts.
I’ll be waiting here with held breath for you to uncover my deeeep secret.
[…] July 12th, 2007 Via Sheezlebub at Pandagon: The New York Times has an article today about Katrina survivors who are still languishing in FEMA trailers two years after hurricane Katrina. […]
The NYT piece is worthless.
To you, possibly. Not all of us advocate as you do.
But hey, truth to power or whatever you think you’re doing.
1) I don’t have a political agenda. (At least not with regard to this issue- I’ll totally cop to wanting to see same-sex marriage legalized throughout the US.) I’m not sure what you think my agenda is, but I’m totally in the dark about it.
2) I certainly wouldn’t say that being in the majority makes me right. We have a style disagreement here- when people misunderstand me, I take a step back and try to clarify. You call people disingenuous.
4) I disagree. Because the NYT piece made me want to take action. And I really don’t think I’m the only one. If it inspires action or even dialogue, it’s not worthless.
And finally, I never said you’d used the word lazy or called you a racist. I’ve also never used the word bootstrap. I’m also not the one who came up with the 30 people number. Don’t lump all of us who disagree with you into the same group.
Wow, I honestly am getting nothing from DA’s argument but “STFU and go do something about it!”
Which assumes that we can’t do both and that what we do must take the correct form, so as to meet the Devil’s approval.
Devil’s Advocate, this is exactly the household/family situation I was imagining when I created the number 30 for a rough approximation of how many people you’d need to feed if you were grocery shopping for 4 families. That’s a 5 person household, probably about the norm, if not a little bit smaller than usual. And 3 of those family members are children who can’t be expected to provide security, build play areas, haul groceries 18 miles, etc. Between the two adults, which of them should provide childcare, which of them should work, which of them should head up a volunteer community organizing network, which of them should haul groceries to feed 5 people? Two adults. at least 4 or 5 full time jobs that need to be done. And one (probably part-time, probably minimum wage) income between the two of them, at best.
Oh, wait. Duh. I must have skimmed the part where you revealed that you’d discovered the secrets of human cloning, so that each of these two women can be in 2 or 3 places at once!
That’s a 5 person household, probably about the norm, if not a little bit smaller than usual.
Well, that’s actually 20, but still. I’m kind of at a loss here, though I have now read through DA’s web page, and maybe we should just smile and nod, and then pay no attention.
whoa, jack…i could have saved myself half a work day and a LOT of aggravation if i’d done that sooner.
YIKES.
That’s all there is to say. Except maybe, f*ckin’ YIKES.
Oh, for fuck’s sake….Fred Phelps??????
I guess “Devil’s Advocate” is literal.
Sorry, tennis guy. This is an incorrect answer. The reason you see teams of Mexicans on construction sites is because they workers are being paid less than minimum wage and aren’t offered the proper Workers Compensation protections. African Americans know they’re entitled to minimum wage and workers comp because they’re Americans. They have papers and can obtain jobs that are labor code compliant.
Mexicans take those jobs harvesting produce and doing landscaping and construction not because there is any quality inherent in Mexican culture that makes them especially hardworking. They do it because they don’t have any other choice.
Suggesting that African Americans do likewise is just insulting to all the generations of labor organizers from our past and to the letter and spirit of the labor laws that they helped shape.
But Mezosub, don’t you understand? Minimum wage and worker’s comp are the handouts that tennis guy is talking about.
But nothing has happened. For two years, you have been ignored and maligned. For two years, you have sat in one stage of shock or another that your life is now gone – that everything you value was swept away by a storm, and that your own government cares so little about you that it has warehoused you to be forgotten.
You, however, are blessed with a skill: you’d been a cook for fifty years, and know how to plan large menus. And after two years – two long, grueling years – you decide to use your superior planning skills to form a working group that develops and implements a grocery pick-up schedule. Some people are skeptical at first, but you all get together and hammer out a useful plan. You do it.
Oh man, you’ve got me all dreamy here. I can imagine the future press articles:
MAN OVERCOMES LAZY BLACK PERSONHOOD — NOW COOKS FOR FOREIGN DIGNITARIES & MOVIE STARS
WASHINGTON, D.C. — “I was a standard, lazy black person, shooting craps and lounging around,” he recalls, frowning slightly. “Then I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and that really changed my perspective on life…” etc.
Then they make a True Story, American Dream! movie out of it.
Imigrant workers also send money back to countries where the dollar goes a lot farther than it does here. Also, they are often illegal workers. Is the solution here to encourage black Americans actively break the law? And for below-minimum wage pay?
DA: by saying that the Katrinaville residents should give up on further help from the government and start taking action to help themselves, you imply that the fact they have not done so for two years (and continue to not do it) is indicative of willful inaction on their part. You may not have meant that, but that’s how it comes across. So you’re going to get flak for it.
For myself, I’ve personally done jack squat for New Orleans. And I intend to keep on doing it. I pay taxes to the government to take care of this sort of thing, which is far too big for me to have any real impact on by myself. I don’t see it as a bad thing to “throw money at them;” I would much rather my money be thrown at them than at Lockheed-Martin for another F-22 we’re never going to need. The problem is the current government is not doing what I consider its duty
Also among the reasons I suspect katrina refugees can’t find day-laborer jobs being filled by illegal hispanics: black citizens do not face deportation if they back-talk the boss or agitate for decent pay. And I wonder how many of those living in Katrinaville are actually healthy enough to perform such labor for any length of time. It’s damn hot there, you know, and a lot of the able-bodied have presumably left already to find work elsewhere.
I’m sure someone has linked this somewhere else but I wanted to link the the wikipedia entry on Hoovervilles. When I saw that pic at the top of this post I immediately thought “this Katrina trailer park is a modern-day Hooverville.”
The sense I get, and this could totally be a wrong sense, is that most likely, the people living in Sugar Hill and similar hoovervilles bushvilles are mainly older people, the disabled, and single moms. People who have few prospects and nowhere else to go.
Notice that the able-bodied and dependentless adults interviewed in the article live in Memphis and Houston.
omg what is with my inability to remember how to strikethrough?
Strikethrough: <strike> </strike>
Eated by the spamulator! NOEZ!!!!!!!11!
I actually wrote to Amanda this morning, hoping Pandagon would cover this! (I thought it’d be her or Sheelzebub!!) I work in New Orleans and the Gulf, with organizations committed to racial equity and justice in the region, trying to tackle the inequities at hand since well before the storm. On my blog today, I wrote a piece called “The Untouchables,” that outlines some of the legislation proposed in the House and Senate that will direct much needed $$ to affordable housing, public housing, and bringing people home in Louisiana and elsewhere.
I urge folks, if you do contact your senators, to tell them YOU SUPPORT H.R. 1227 and S. 1668, the Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Acts. The House bill is (unsurprisingly) the more progressive of the two (explicitly requiring the government to honor the “right to return” of public housing residents), but the Senate bill is pretty close, and has some additional funds for affordable housing.
Supporting these two bills is critical; the Senate’s has just been introduced, and is already under GOP fire for expanding entitlement programs (it would transfer FEMA-assisted households into Section 8 programs).
Why don’t you see any blacks at these sites? Because liberal apologists like you have been excusing blacks and giving them handouts for going on 40 years now. Your “compassion� has destroyed an entire generation of blacks.
I don’t think this kind of comment should be allowed in this thread. There are enough places this asshole can spout about how much he hates black people without having to spew his shit all over the Katrina survivors.
Also, the strike tag is deprecated in HTML, so it’s better to use the “del” tag.
Opoponax, I suspect the same thing. The Katrinavilles are holding tanks for “those left behind” while others are struggling mightily in the cities to attempt to send money back or to bring their families up.
I can’t count the number of Katrina refugees (I refuse to soften to “evacuees” …. they can’t go home, because the crisis isn’t and won’t be over) I have seen come through my homeless day center. Most only stayed a brief time, while they gathered resources (often arriving without any ID and only the clothes on their backs) and began job hunting or working on the process of collecting disability, or connecting with family, or whatever it took to find housing. These guys (and women) aren’t ever going home. They’re resettling… and they certainly don’t have the resources to send home to Katrinaville, nor can they afford to bring Katrinaville residents here.
I was down on the Gulf Coast for three weeks after the hurricane, working with the Red Cross. If you go back to that time period on my livejournal, you’ll find my entries and a link to some photos I took. I still have nightmares. I wasn’t even there for the hurricane, just watching the eye creep closer to NOLA from my safe, comfortable midwestern home, and I knew what I was looking at.
DA has refused twice to address the evidence I presented that not only is government at all levels providing inadequate help, but also that government at some levels (at least) is actively hindering recovery efforts, often out of racist motives. It’s easier to pretend I didn’t write it than to address it, I guess.
the opoponax, <strike>
Some Text</strike>…
Regarding “hoovervilles” and the Great Depression, it was the combination of public works employment (from the Government under Roosevelt) and war production for WWII that finally broke through the poverty cycle. Without the war it’s unclear how much longer many of the problems might have dragged out.
The problem is the Depression affected white people too (and across the whole country). In the case of the Katrina victims, it’s all too easy to write them off as poor, uneducated, unskilled (and therefore unworthy).
That this crime against American citizens is still unresolved after 2-years says a lot about where “America” is at as a nation…
Just the money that disappeared when bales of cash meant for contractors were stolen in Iraq (a pittance compared with what we’re spending in total) would have been more than enough to fix most of these lingering problems in NOLA.
There was once an America that would have fixed these problems in a matter of weeks or months. But that America is dead.
Glory Be To The Invisible Hand!!!…
Oh, and yes, I have spoken to (my Congressman is extremely accessible) and written to my congressman to deal with this. He’s as frustrated as I am, frankly.
DA has refused twice to address the evidence I presented that not only is government at all levels providing inadequate help, but also that government at some levels (at least) is actively hindering recovery efforts, often out of racist motives
DA’s argument against that, at least as I understand it, is “No DUH! WHat did you expect? So what’s your story? Why are you failing at your job by discussing this on the internet?!” Tripe, but there it is.
For the record, Katrina survivors are not all Black and they’re not all poor.
My mother-in-law lost her home in the flood.
My father-in-law lost his home in the flood. (They were divorced, separate homes, but still living in the same neighborhood.)
My friend lost his music gigs in the flood. My husband’s friends lost jobs, lost pets, lost friends…
And they’re mostly white or Indian.
Just saying…
Well remember that Katrina “affected White people, too”, as well.
It’s just that there’s a combination of factors at play that are insuring that while Whites affected by the storm are more easily able to, bare minimum, get into a position to find some bootstraps to pull themselves back up by, and insuring that Blacks affected are at best given no help at all and at worst actively discriminated against.
a HUGE part of the problem is local and extragovernmental, and proves exactly why libertarians who say that private aid and local government are the answer are so dead wrong. When private aid is run by racist whites, black people are unlikely to benefit much from it. When local government looks only after the interest of whites (and usually the more well off whites), black people are actively hindered.
Oh, Elaine, I am very aware that white and native americans and creole and cajuns were hurt as well. I am also (unfortunately) very aware that they were far more likely to be provided bootstraps than black people affected by Katrina.
While I was wandering around in Mississippi and Alabama after the storm, inspecting houses for damage in order to get the residents some Red Cross money, I was actively discouraged from entering houses in “some neighborhoods” (you know the ones) because they were “dangerous”, even though in order to assess damage at all accurately, it was necessary to enter the homes. With the exception of meth lab houses (and I know what to look for there) there was no reason not to enter any of the houses, other than that the occupants were black or Native American. There was a huge split amongst the volunteers about the race issue, and it didn’t fall along the lines you’d expect. Frankly, I think many of the southerners were far more helpful to the blacks than the northerners.
I tried reading through this entire thread, but I might go blind in the process. I am an outraged citizen/devoted Pandagon reader, and an active consultant in New Orleans and the Gulf. Perhaps I can offer some detail and possibly disrupt this debate b/w Devil’s Advocate and everyone else, it seems, on this thread. I am going to provide so much info I am not going to include links, but I have some on my own site.
First, private philanthropy has been phenomenal since the storm, but too often most of it is earmarked for emergency relief, a period of time long past by now. Many organizations have committed for the long haul, to assist w/redevelopment, and private philanthropy can be funneled through these charitable organizations, incl. religious ones (e.g., Mercy Corps) or large scale groups like Oxfam America. Large groups like this have a sustained and active presence in the Gulf, as do the major philanthropies in the U.S., such as Rockefeller, Ford, Surdna, etc. There is a group of progressive organizations known as the Gulf Coast Funders for Equity, which includes Tides Foundation, the Twenty-First Century Foundation, the LA Disaster Recovery Foundation, Oxfam, and others that escape me at the moment (Ms. Foundation, I think). You can likely visit any of their websites and make donations specifically for Katrina recovery, in LA, in MS, in AL, in TX. All of these groups fund local groups, so some portion of your $$ will reach grassroots groups. You can also donate to ACORN, to Industrial Areas Foundation (esp. The Jeremiah Group in LA and The Metropolitan Organization in Houston), or PICO-LIFT (esp. All Congregations Together in NO), or Alabama ARISE, or the MS Center for Justice if you’re looking to contribute to organizing efforts, incl. in diaspora cities (ACORN has a Katrina Survivors Council and TMO has major evacuee networks that they work with). Black churches are always a great resource, and the Episcopalian Diocese is a great way to go in NOLA (avoid the Catholics, I say with experience and as a lapsed one). If you’re looking for really grassroots groups, try the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, a predominantly black and low-income group in New Orleans that is organizing for self-determination in recovery that was in existence prior to the storm and renamed themselves after Katrina hit. There is of course, Common Ground (a previous commenter incl. the link, thanks), they’re a big one. You can also support worker organizing, which is esp. reaching out to the Latino population, through the MS Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA), or the Loyola Law Project, or Interfaith Worker Justice. Once you find one of these orgs, you can probably find others. (As an aside, IWJ is one of the few working on bridging the “black-brown divide” in the labor movement, i.e., fostering collaboration among largely disenfranchised blacks and exploited Latinos, and SEIU is trying to train and organize and place African-Americans in laborer and allied health positions).
But keep in mind, and this is the problem w/relying on the private market (incl. the non-profit sector) to fill the gap the govt. long vacated (I think something everyone in this thread agrees on, regardless of how that abdication ruffles their feathers): private $$ is siloed - affordable housing development vs. education reform vs. social service provision vs. worker organizing vs. immigrant rights, etc. - and these divisions are usually arranged accd’ing to the preferences of the funders. For instance, Rockefeller decided they’d provide $3M to a planning process in the City of NO, as if two had not already occurred. You got the $$, you set the agenda. Nonetheless, I urge you to give, but think about what you’d like to prioritize and find a group (trust me, they’re all out there) that is doing the work you want to see. For comprehensive solutions, well, folks are still working on that, and its difficult w/o govt. stewardship.
Another issue is the small-scale results that inevitably arise from such a fragmented approach to recovery. We have ceased to live in a New Deal/Marshall Plan world, and as Chavez once chided Bush, he couldn’t organize a Little League team. Seeing comprehensive, large-scale public works-esque recovery is not going to happen, though supporting the legislation I mentioned earlier (H.R. 1227 and S. 1668) is an important first step. The AFL-CIO has committed over $1B to the region over 7 years, in the hopes that they might fill this govt. gap, but it’s certainly a tall order. Even a private sector rush to gentrify is lacking, and the gazillions of Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone low-income housing development tax credits that have been allocated to the region are proving difficult to spend, mainly because the post-storm cost of materials and insurance are making any large scale redevelopment - affordable or otherwise - very difficult and extremely expensive. Private sector developers - most of it is very small scale, as larger ones wait to see who jumps first, though I know there is effort on the ground to bring affordable, green and scalable solutions to bear, such as modular housing or steel or concrete panel construction so future homes can withstand the weather in the Gulf.
I love this site, and I love its energy, but I hope we can channel it towards assisting some of the groups I just mentioned, and I hope that we can continue to blog and talk about Gulf Coast recovery. One of the major problems in recovery is truthfully a lack of sustained national attention. Shit is not ok down there, it was racist, classist, sexist, paternal and unfair before the storm, and too many powers that be have little interest in truly changing that structure. This a rare moment for change, believe me, esp. among younger generations who are desperate for leadership roles in the region, and a chance to share and test new ideas for pursuing equity and justice (there’s a fascinating generation gap among Civ Rights activists down there and young leadership, for instance). Relying on community building, community control, etc. is noble, already happening and totally insufficient (necc. but not sufficient, if you will), because it is TOO SMALL scale to respond to the level of the problems Katrina (and Wilma and Rita) exacerbated across the geographic equivalent of RI to DC (or about that) . There is a lack of leadership at the local, state and federal levels when it comes to rebuilding the Gulf, and another thing we can do is demand that all the 2008 Pres. candidates have a legit, viable rebuilding plan.
That’s all I got. Hope this helps.
Oh, bloody hell, Devil’s Advocate turns out to be a Fred Phelps tool, if you look at his website–several steps below the libertarian nutjob he posed as here..
I’m kinda surprised that people in the US, with all their talk of freedom, haven’t rebelled in any meaningful way.
That’s because the American myth of “Fweedom!!” serves as a reassuring sedative, an official Mecca for everyone to worship. As long as the leaders keep publicly bowing and scraping in the same direction as everyone else, few notices that they’re doing it crouched above the public’s back, with their tools casually sliding in and out of the public’s assholes.
Thanks for the great info and context, Leigh. Seconded on ACORN being a good organization, as well, and also on the difficulties that earmarking causes for nonprofits.
Mark:
The answer ought to be obvious: Private charities don’t help everyone who needs help not because they don’t want to or because they’re poorly managed, but because they can’t. If they could, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.
I have this idea; it’s novel, I know, but you might want to try it.
How’s about reading my site before slamming it. Hell, you might still hate it after looking through everything, but I’m willing to bet you;ll hate it far less. Take this, for example: http://www.therighttobewrong.net/may_31_2007.pdf
That’s right; I don’t agree with Phelps. I just worry that whatever rights we take from him for his abuses of them will not be there for us when WE need them.
/Not a libertarian
//Votes NDP (Canada)
Leigh, thank you.
Hey Rea, thanks for visiting my site!
I have this novel idea; it’s crazy, but it just might work.
How about actually reading the stuff I wrote instead of just skimming the title. I don’t agree with Phelps. In fact, I think he’s a dyed-in-the-wool sociopath with delusions of grandeur.
I support his right to picket at funerals. If you want to know why, read the FAQ and the oldest letter in my ‘mail’ section.
/Votes NDP (Canada)
// Psst - That puts me about two steps to the right of supporting unvarnished socialism
Before I did that, I said this:
And by way of response, I got:
So yeah, I think disingenuous is a pretty good description of some of these responses.
[…] For those of you engaged in the struggles for racial and economic equity and justice, human rights and equitable development, there is work to be done in merging the explicit commitment to the “right to return” of the House Bill with the easily violated requirements of HUD’s “best efforts” in the Senate Bill. Furthermore, the failure to require the re-opening of all public housing, versus only occupied units, in the Senate bill, completely ignores the long, long waiting list for public housing in New Orleans prior to Katrina, as well as the increased need for subsidized housing since the 2005 hurricane season further eroded the precarious economic situations of so many. The reliance on project-based vouchers - and any policy euphemistically described as “housing choice” - will need to be monitored and enforced, as voucher programs, while widespread, leave families particularly vulnerable to the whims of the market, especially the participation of landlords in an extremely tight, extremely expensive rental housing market now. The requirement that FEMA-assisted families be transferred to Section 8 assistance after January 1, 2008 is a good one, but is also already under ideological fire from Republicans. A discursive fight awaits us. […]
[…] Since you?re already down, you won?t mind if I kick you, will you? at Pandagon : […]
I’m a monster, Rea – A MONSTERRRRRR!
One thing that struck me, from the Times article:
Anyone who knows anything about housing—hell, anyone who thinks about this for five seconds—knows that crime is just not a concern in complexes for the elderly. Very, very few old folks have the mindset and/or energy to commit acts of violence.A public-housing landlord told me years ago that “owning a housing complex for the elderly is like owning a slice of heaven. They don’t make any trouble or cause any problems. The only bad thing they ever do is die on you.”
Proof, as if any were needed, that “crime” is code for “black people.”
Wasn’t Jefferson Parish the place where they called the police to block the bridge that gave access from N.O.?
That struck me, too.
I think you’re right, I thikn that is the place they blocked the bridge. God, it’s stuff like this that makes me ashamed to live in this country now.
DA, from the FAQ on your website:
that’s enough to make me think you’re pretty fucking cracked. hate hanging out there in the open for all to see ain’t any more virtuous than hate that’s hidden deep inside. it’s just as dangerous. you think protecting fred phelps’ right to piss all over the diversity of society makes society more diverse, somehow. fine. you want to devote your website to that fact, fine also. but don’t be surprised if, after associating with monsters, people start mistaking you for a monster.
then again, maybe you just like being contrarian. some people get off on that.
i confess i’m also wondering what it is you want, exactly. many here have pointed out that those stuck in katrinaville are already doing what they can to get by. you’re still refusing, as far as i can see, to concede that hurdles have been put in front of them unnecessarily, by the fucking government, no less. they’re not being provided with basic services. as people have already said, they shouldn’t HAVE to band together in order to get themselves groceries. that’s entirely the government’s fault, for siting the camp eighteen miles from anywhere, with no public transit available. they already are doing what they can. what the hell else do you want them to do?
is it wrong to be angry on their behalf? you actually seem to think the reporter somehow did something wrong by covering this story. odd how it can be so important to make sure fred phelps can let everyone in the world know he hates fags, but a major moral failing for a reporter to tell the world forgotten stories of human suffering.
Yes, it was, town of Gretna. Jeff. Parish has also outlawed the taco trucks that have come to populate many parking lots in the region, serving not only the growing Latino population, but the rest of the locals lined up at them each day.
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-8/118240582938870.xml&coll=1
“Councilman Louis Congemi pushed for the changes, likening the mobile food stands to other post-Katrina symbols that Jefferson officials are trying to clear away, such as travel trailers, storage units and blighted houses.
He said the trucks contribute to a cluttered environment that is unpleasantly reminiscent of the early days after the storm. And he said their temporary nature makes them inappropriate in a parish that should focus on growing fixed businesses.”
Yes, let’s forget that Katrina ever happened! Everything’s back to normal! Nothing to see around here, folks, move it along, oh but not in this direction.
That is fricken hilarious (but also like totally not). Latino Immigrants: your food reminds us too much of the immediate aftermath of Katrina — please go back to Mexico now, kthxbye.
so a taco stand is problematic, because its “temporary nature” makes it “inappropriate”, but it’s totally fine to make people live in emergency trailers for two years. got it.
I haven’t much to add to the discussion, except a short story recommendation: “Femaville 29″, which can be found in the 2007 Best SF and Fantasy anthology. I don’t want to spoiler it, so I’ll just say: read it. Somehow it manages to be metaphorically hopeful and metonymically hopeless at the same time.
a HUGE part of the problem is local and extragovernmental, and proves exactly why libertarians who say that private aid and local government are the answer are so dead wrong. When private aid is run by racist whites, black people are unlikely to benefit much from it. When local government looks only after the interest of whites (and usually the more well off whites), black people are actively hindered.
And for your garden-variety libertarian, that’s a feature, not a bug. But libertarians are perfect Ubermenschen, untainted by lowly feelings of racism, so they’ll whine about state rights instead. They’ll express admiration for Martin Luther King, but when it comes to the Civil Rights Act, well, they’re not to keen on supporting that. Racist? How dare you! It’s all a misunderstanding. They don’t like it because it’s Federal interference — pure, untrammeled Evil.
I agree that racism abounds in LA (the context I know), the South, the U.S., etc. But also keep in mind that New Orleans is governed by a black power structure and racism still exists, from the white biz community AND the Creole political and business leadership towards the poorer and darker. Mayor Nagin, and others, have no interest in seeing poor African-Americans return to NO.
Go to my links section and watch “Keith Allen will Burn in Hell� for a better understanding of why I like them. Fred Phelps is a sociopath. If not for him, those others could have done a lot of good in the world.
I didn’t say it’s more virtuous. I said it’s less dangerous. For more on why, read the June 30th entry in my Mail section.
I’ve done stuff for which I could rightfully be tarred a monster. If you think my website counts, you need some perspective on life.
Fred Phelps doesn’t make society more diverse, but silencing him would make it less so. For more on that, check out the “Is Shirley Phelps Roper a child abuser?� letter.
And other people get off on having everyone agree with them, nodding heads sagely that a given piece of advice or bit of opinion is utterly beyond reproach by anyone with an ounce of wit.
Echo chambers are irritating.
Concede????
I have demonstrated nothing but contempt for the government that failed them. The obstacles they face are daunting.
The government will not help them much, however; and nothing anyone says or does is likely to change that fact.
They don’t need to wait and grow hopeless in the face of a government unwilling to hold up its end of the bargain.
Nope. I’m just pessimistic the story will make one whit of difference to the Katrina survivors – ergo, totally worthless.
And there, you’ve made my point for me: forgotten stories.
This isn’t the first reporter to have covered the FEMA trailers – not the first to discuss the administrations failing and mishandlings. Far, far from the first.
But despite that, how many on this board thought about the people in FEMA trailers even once in the last week? How many were terribly concerned or active before today? How many will be concerned and active a week from now?
How many daily readers of the NYT do you suppose read that article and said, “Pff, silly reporter; I’ve known about those FEMA trailers for the last eight months�?
How many daily readers of the NYT do you suppose read that article and said, “Pff, silly reporter; I’ve known about those FEMA trailers for the last eight months�?
“Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”
And while you’re trying to move that mountain of shit that is the Bush administration, the Katrina survivors should…wait.
And while you’re trying to move that mountain of shit that is the Bush administration, the Katrina survivors should…wait.
And talking about it on the internet means we aren’t making real world efforts either. No, I get the logic. It doesn’t mean it makes sense.
The problem with New Orleans is that there is no Wall Street there. If there was a Wall Street in the 9th Ward, you can bet that the devasted areas would be spic and span by now, even if it led to the health-related deaths of those who cleaned it up.
The Bush Administration “cleans up” where it matters: in lower Manhattan, in Iraq, in places involving money or oil. Bourbon Street, which involves booze, is thus a priority and I’m sure it is fine. Casino areas are probably also being repaired all along the Gulf Coast.
But low-income people living in trailers? Pull-eeze.
The Hollywood movie industry *needs* those devastated areas as pictureque sets for films like DEJA VU, don’t ya know?
Devil’s Advocate, claiming to be progressive is fine, but saying that U.S. citizens and especially residents of the U.S. South should just give up on government because it’s broken, racist, and not going to help anyone anyway is more than a little offensive. Any progressive worth the title knows that there are persistent problems in all societies. The U.S. is no different from other countries in this respect. Would you tell a Mexican to ignore the abuses that their state and federal governments are still committing because “its never going to change anyway”? Well that’s what you are telling all of us. Having grown up in the U.S. South, I resent people telling me that my society is broken and I should just let racism and corruption flourish because I can’t change them anyway.
Leigh, thank you so much for the information. It is a challenge for all of us not to become accustomed to things like the aftermath of Katrina. It is possible to help. Pretending that governments don’t have a duty to provide for the wellbeing of their citizens is one of the great lies of neoliberalism and conservative politicians. We cannot allow problems like Katrina to just disappear from the public discourse. Giving whatever money or time we can as individuals is important, but so is lobbying for political change. The government needs to do its job, and we should never be silent until it does.
What a pile of racist bullshit.
Nothing wrong with talking about it on the ‘net. There is something wrong with tarring someone as a racist for daring to suggest that Katrina survivors must take collective action because their government, entrusted with protecting its citizens, has failed them in every way imaginable.
From what I’d seen in news reports, the Katrina survivors act as people stuck in limbo would be expected to act: they don’t make plans because they’re in a consent state of waiting.
This has nothing to do with their race. This has nothing to do with their intelligence. This has to do with their thinking the FEMA trailers are a temporary situation – that public pressure on the government is going to change things any time soon.
My guess is they’re going to be there for a couple of years more at least. They have to stop thinking about their situation as transient and weld a community from what they have.
They have people trained to do a lot of the stuff they need done. They should get together, inventory their skills, and start contributing according to their unique abilities. They’re not islands; they’re a community in it for the long haul.
I never said they must do this for themselves because no one else should help. I said they should do this for themselves because no one else has the will.
(I initially brought up “bitching on the internet� as a response to someone else’s dig that I don’t do my part.)
It is offensive; that I’ll own. But it’s also true. The US government is headed by a number of incompetent racists. People have tried everything from protests to congressional proceedings to get this government in line with the law, and nothing has worked very well so far.
I can’t see any way to deal with this government (until election time at least) but to treat it as a nuisance that is best kept at arm’s length.
A good maxim is as follows: If the Bush administration ever does anything good, it’s purely accidental.
So unless they accidentally start rebuilding stuff in New Orleans for those living in the FEMA trailers, I can’t see it happening.
I’d tell him that if he wants a different government than what he has, he’ll be required to sweat for it.
My idea is to have the Katrina survivors flip off the government by building up their own community. Yours is to keep shooting spit balls at the monolith until it gets annoyed enough to drag the refugees out of limbo and into affordable housing.
I genuinely hope your way works, but I doubt it will.
New Orleans is governed by a black power structure and racism still exists
While New Orleans itself has a black mayor and others in rather influential positions, the places the refugees were displaced to (especially the towns likely to play host to Femavilles) do not.
Though the bottom line is not the skin color of the major politicians, the bottom line is the racism of the folks writing policy and working with the public. There are certain forms of completely invisible systematic racism which are enforced by almost all white people down there, no matter how well-intentioned. I say this as someone who grew up white in south Louisiana, in the very communities playing host to refugees (and about 2 towns over from the area Sugar Hill is located). A lot of it is stuff that is so deeply internalized that I’m just starting to see it myself after 8 years living in the liberal northeast, getting a degree from one of the most radical universities in the US, and living almost exclusively in non-white enclaves.
It’s in the association of black people with “crime”. The plentiful aid for homeowners, and virtually none for renters. The charade that refusal to rebuild low-income housing is a good thing for New Orleans. The tendency for local politicians to pass ordinances against wearing certain types of clothes (clothes popular with young black men, wow, what a coincedence!). And even more things it would take me a book to fully explain.
Opoponax,
I’m in full agreement w/you. One of the things about working in NOLA (or in pursuit of equity and justice, more broadly) that I love yet find exhausting and discomfiting is how it demands that you confront all your own conscious and subconscious bias and bullshit. I was going to get into it on the Jena Six post here at Pandagon yesterday when Boston became the default example of Northern racism, share my own confessionals of prejudice and learning experiences as a Bostonian/Northerner/Northeastern liberal/white woman/outsider in the South/insert identity here, but I figured it wouldn’t add much, and really where to begin?
The thing about NOLA’s effectively tripartate racial structure (I know the city’s/region’s history and how much more mixed it is than just this crude picture I’m painting here) that is so startling for those of us fortunate enough to be paying attention is the subtle and not-so-subtle racism playing out along a more nuanced color line than most Americans encounter (or fail to see).
Also, I come from a family of poor, urban whites, with the accompanying public housing, homelessness, addiction, wedlock kiddies, dropouts, incarceration, and assorted, associated phenomena, so my frames on poverty, race, class, justice, etc. have their own twist that keeps me from sliding into complete privileged white oblivion.
But it’s a daily challenge to stay reflexive and aware, no doubt.
Do you know what I did when I lost my job? I spent all day, every day, looking for another one. Much like the folks in this article are doing.
Yeah, but, you know… I’ve been unemployed and seeking, too, and there does come a point - usually after a week or so if you’re not in a major city - where you have an application and a resume in for every relevant opportunity you could be expected to commute to daily, and then you’re just waiting for phone calls when you’re not dropping off resumes at the places that aren’t even looking for them.
Let’s not pretend like unemployment is a full-time job, even though over-motivated career counselors would have you believe that it is. The interminable waiting is what makes it so god-awful. (Thank god for World of Warcraft.)
Re: the trailers - aside from not having a vehicle, what’s to stop someone from hitching up their FEMA trailer and basically going wherever they want? I don’t ask as a suggestion, just idle curiosity.
Tenants don’t own the trailers. One of the vulnerabilities in living in them is that FEMA theoretically can take them back at any time. Right now they’re obligated to provide assistance through a certain period of time, but no one can “drive off” in a trailer that doesn’t actually belong to them.
Now, we could probably debate the likelihood that FEMA could track down the missing trailer, but that does seem like something the Bushies would decide to spend $$ on, probably reallocate some funds from all the ICE raids they’re supporting these days.
Also, the trailers are packed in pretty tight, so you’d really need to get most of the residents, or at least those blocking you in, to rise up and strike out on your wagon train w/you.
And of course, now we’re back to the little detail of those missing cars w/ trailer hitches to realize this little fantasy.
DA, again, what you’re failing to realize, again and again and again, is that there really is nothing these guys can do to help themselves that they’re not already doing. Those who are young and strong and unencumbered enough have gone to cities to find work. Those left behind have formed social networks to get daily needs solved. There are NO resources left over from which to build a way out. They were deliberately trapped in a situation from which there is no escape.
And also, FUCK you for thinking we don’t know or care what’s going on. I went down there for three weeks after the storm. My postings about the situation while I was down there led directly to emergency aid being provided to a town that had been overlooked. I have had several conversations and correspondences with my congressman and his aide about the situation and what we can do about it. I work for an agency that often provides direct services to those displaced by the storm, and more often refers people to the (very few) agencies still around who have funds earmarked for Katrina.
Bloggers in the US have kept the issue alive, and given it new life, over and over again over the past two years, when the government and msm would just as soon we stop talking about it. As was pointed out by Leigh, above, millions of dollars have poured into the area by ordinary Americans from around the country…
But that doesn’t change the fact that the refugees no longer have homes, and that our government feels no obligation to replace their lost homes with homes of similar quality and price range. That doesn’t change the fact that they were deliberately housed either in chaotic urban centers or in rural “refugee camps” where the basics of bootstrapping (transportation, available jobs, capital) were denied to them. That doesn’t change the fact that the msm and the government repeat the Big Lie that the Katrina victims don’t deserve the help they got and certainly don’t deserve more help.
Finally, what on earth makes you think the refugees think the FEMA camps are temporary? They’re not stupid. They know better. They know they’ve been abandoned. And there is no escape, except possibly for the very best and brightest of their children, if the weight of chronic despair doesn’t kill their spirit. It’s despair you’re seeing, not lack of initiative. They’ve already done the things you’re suggesting, and been rebuffed. Go back to the article about the experienced hotel worker in Memphis who has literally applied to every hotel in the Memphis area for a job, some of them twice, and been rebuffed for two years. The situation in rural areas is far, far worse.
While in Alabama, I met a man who had a two year college degree in a good trade. He had a wife and three children, one of which had asthma severe enough to require a nebulizer be kept in the home. A tree had fallen during the hurricane and split his double wide trailer in half. By the time I arrived, a week after the storm, he had already built a sturdy wall and watertight roof to replace the parts of his house the storm had destroyed (out of scrap wood, no less). What he couldn’t do was replace the nebulizer, which had been crushed by the tree. We did financial assessments on those we helped. With a two year trade degree, he worked a part time, unskilled labor job at the only major employer in town, a maker of a popular sugar substitute. His wife commuted sixty miles one way to a low paying clerical job in the nearest town of any size. Her mother watched the children when both of them were at work. Why on earth was an educated man with good job skills working unskilled labor? In large part, because he was black. Katrina set this man and his family back easily 10,000 dollars. He was unlikely to be fully reimbursed by insurance, as insurance was already finding excuses to not pay on trailers destroyed by the storm.
You want to know what he wanted from Red Cross? A replacement nebulizer, for his daughter. That was it. That was all. I’ve often wondered if that family has since had to make the difficult decision to uproot their children from the generations of extended family support in that county (half the streets in the town were named after the family) and move to an urban area. Probably, I figure. And not only does it sadden me, it pisses me the HELL off.
This was a family with a lot of strengths. Two adults in the household plus an intact extended family nearby. Intelligence and education and decent job skills. Home owners. Relatively young and healthy. And yet, I’m willing to bet long odds that they were forced to sell their home, uproot, and move to a city where they would then be forced to live hand to mouth and would never be homeowners again, because the wages in cities for service and skilled workers fall behind the cost of living. Those people in the Katrinavilles? Unless we get cracking building some permanent housing in a place where transportation is available and the community is welcoming, they can expect to live and die there with no real hope of ever escaping. And your smug “not saying” that they deserve it is part of the cause. Thanks, asshole.
Odanu,
thanks for the shout-out and sharing your own experiences. I wanted to post a comment on your blog too, but I think I have to sign-in or something….
I don’t think I have anonymous posters banned, but I might. I’ll check in the morning.
Seriously, people. Devil’s Advocate has responded to your posts for almost half a day now. Please stop that leg of the discussion when this thread wakes up tomorrow morning. It’s like you’re all just looking for reasons to get pissed off. No one’s said anything new and actually informative except Leigh, and what this thread needs is a hearty dose of real information about what’s going on in NOLA and all the areas affected by Katrina and Rita.
I realize I’m stepping in here late, but could somebody TOTALLY FUCKING PLEASE bring some facts to the table on this instead of opining what FEMA trailer inhabitants do or do not do? From a cursory perusal of nola.com and the Times-Picayune website, I’ve learned that there are several dozen and probably upwards of 100 FEMA trailer parks; that parks receive greatly varying levels of aid and thus should not be treated as equals; that Nagin doesn’t want to build more FEMA parks and instead wants the government to build modular homes, which FEMA doesn’t want to do, so Nagin and other city officials are using their power to delay or prevent whatever trailer parks FEMA is looking to build; that local residents don’t like the trailer parks and frequently protest them, as well as get in fights with local police when FEMA tries to clear and control the land; that in some trailer parks over 1/3 of the inhabitants are kids under 18, and there’s a lot of drug use and crime; and that, according to a Democracy Now! interview Amy Goodman did with a resident of the Renaissance Village park, the places are controlled by outsourced private security and residents are prohibited from speaking to reporters unless it’s done off the controlled property and in the presence of a FEMA representative.
After reading this thread, if people put half as much energy into writing their local reps as they put into lambasting DA, I’ll be shocked.
Wow DA, congrats on sticking through all the absurdity. Your first post didn’t warrant all the attacks.
Your interests are obviously in the well-being of the victims.. the 2x victims, once by a hurricane, and again by the government they payed taxes to for years, partly for future aid in the case of a hurricane.
I think if you would’ve kept saying “this government” instead of “the government,” people would’ve gotten the point. There’s no way that asking for the Bush gang’s aid is gonna result in anything but more waiting. It’s unjust, but it’s reality.
“what’s to stop someone from hitching up their FEMA trailer and basically going wherever they want?”
In addition to what Leigh said, there’s also the fact of gas, and the fact that life on the road is more expensive than life in a trailer park. The fact that there’s relative safety in numbers. The fact that even if you were to take away the trailer and park it somewhere else, you’d either have to have a friend or family who owned the land and let you park, or the money to pay rent (which is what most people who live in typical trailers do). Plumbing hookups are another issue. All in all, it’s probably easier to just stay put.
or, they could put together their own public transit system, their own public safety system, their own daycares and groceries and networks of basic services, with little experience and even less capital! gee, i know it looks bleak now, what with so many of them unemployed and all, but with a little luck and a little pluck and stars in their goddamn eyes…
i know this isn’t the first article on the FEMA trailers. i think most people know that. people have short memories, for better or worse, and the stories of the people in the gulf get buried beneath the rest of the news of the day. still, that’s no reason to stop talking about the issue. healthcare is broken in this country, too, and we have every reason to believe that it will remain so under the current administration. i guess we should just stop complaining and pool our resources! one person can concoct penicillin in their kitchen in their spare time, someone else can cut up old bedsheets for bandages… c’mon, no need to despair! bitching about it won’t do any good; now come on and help me sterilise these steak knives, we’ve got a tonsillectomy to do!
the things that would help people most in this situation are not things that can be provided by the community itself. i’m not sure if you’re just committed to defending your point, or what, but a bit of consideration would make that clear. “collective action” only goes so far. it doesn’t get you public transit. it doesn’t get you easy access to grocery stores. i can’t blame them for losing hope. it’s kind of ridiculous to blame them for losing hope. shame on you, katrina victims, for losing the bloom of optimism in the face of insurmountable odds!
on phelps: i scanned bits of your website, at least; i don’t really care to read much more. you seem terribly eager to link it; i guess at least you’re getting some traffic out of all this. phelps strays outside the realm of discourse and into harrassment, in my opinion. legally, there may not be a line drawn, but his actions hover somewhere this side of burning crosses on peoples’ lawns, so, no. i don’t give a fuck if phelps is repressed. if that means someday down the line i am forbidden to shriek hatespeech at funerals while coercing kids into waving placards with even more hate all over them, i’ll somehow get by, i think. ZOMG OHNOES CHILLING EFFEKZ!!!1! whatever.
i never called you a monster. i don’t know you, and you don’t have a squadron of kids wearing silkscreened t-shirts with your warped beliefs emblazoned on them for my convenience, so i wouldn’t call you that. i don’t think there’s anything noble in defending phelps, though — and phelps, he is a monster. and he’s batshit enough that i’m surprised he hasn’t announced he’ll be picketing your funeral, someday.
Oh yes, trapped without a hope. In fact, it’s totally pointless of them to do anything but whatever hidden thing they’re doing. They should just wait for the government to help – for the shining white knight of big media to ease their pain.
I pointed out that a lot of posters here are angry at me for insensitivity when in fact they weren’t even thinking about the issue before now. You’ve decided to take offense to that, as if my comment were directed specifically at you. You’ve decided to cut a general garment to your fit, and that’s your own damn problem.
Okay, fair enough.
And how has all this work benefited Katrina survivors, again? All the time you’ve spent with storm survivors, ringing and writing your congressman – how much better have conditions become over the last two yeas?
FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! EXACTLY! I mean, I’ve only been saying that throughout this entire fucking thread. I wonder how many Pandagonians are going to pop up and indicate you are a closet racist for stating that simple fact.
Of COURSE it’s despair we’re seeing. That is my point. Keep telling them there’s no escape – that they’ll languish there for another five years because their government sucks. Tell ‘em! Tell them they’ve been abandoned. Tell them they don’t matter. Go ahead, kill what remains of their spirit.
Or you can tell them they can get together and pool what resources they have; that they can treat this event like they would the apocalypse and rebuild with what they have.
It’s the difference between despair and hope, and that is the point you are missing.
Your comment falls into the category of rank stupidity, which isn’t surprising considering what else you managed to post:
Look back over the thread. Rea brought up my site, not me.
At any rate, you may be fine with giving up your rights because some offensive asshole abuses them; but I’m not fine with it.
Phelps and his followers aren’t trespassing on people’s lawns, nor are they destroying others’ property (e.g., by burning crosses in others’ yards). But if they want to burn crosses on their own lawns, so long as they’re complying with the fire code, I don’t give a damn.
Grow a spine, already. Your hurt fee-fees aren’t an excuse to abridge freedom.
My “warped belief� extends no further than a defense of WBC’s free speech. If you had done more than skim the site, you would’ve seen that.
But hey, it’s much better to go on a light-weight tangent because you feel as if Phelps should be silenced. Hmmm…I feel like habeas corpus should be suspended so we can better catch them evil ter’ists. I’m scared, after all, and since rights can be abridged for reasons of sentiment, I think the right to a fair trial should go, too.
DA, I kind of agree with you. I’ll probably get yelled at too, but I think I see what you’re saying. It’s like all these racist, classist jerks would keep making comments about the survivors of Katrina, and in the meantime, the survivors would all pull together, and the next time someone showed up to comment on how “pathetic and lazy” black people are, the refugees could go, “FUCK YOU, you racist shits, we are perfectly smart and resourceful and can survive just fine, no thanks to you.”
However, if that happened, the current power structure would pat itself on the back and go, “See? We’re so smart. We didn’t give them any help, and they helped themselves!” I think that’s why everyone is so mad at you, and why you’ve been lumped in there.
But we live in Canada, and we know that the only way Natives in isolated rural communities get any help is if they do it themselves. The govt just dithers around and lets their homes flood every year, and lets their water (if they get water) be of abysmal quality, etc. In the US, there’s that village in Alaska that’s sinking because of global warming, and the govt isn’t doing anything to help them move to safer ground.
I disagree with you about how complaining doesn’t help. I can complain and help at the same time. Seeing people who live in appalling, third world conditions in two of the richest fucking countries in the world disgusts me so much that I want to spend my life both complaining and helping. And self-reliance and community initiatives and charity have their limits. There are things that need to be done that only an entity as large and powerful as govt can accomplish. This is true of isolated Native communities in Canada as well, right?
Anyway, I read into the article the same thing as a couple of other commenters. The people in the trailer parks are the single mothers with small children, the disabled, and the elderly. Very likely, over half the community can’t contribute to your plan, and that probably contributes to the overall despair. I would bet that the people of Sugar Hill sit around going, “Well, we could try this…” and then realize why that wouldn’t work.
Frankly, if my family and I were in such a situation when we were little, my father would have left to go look for work, and then sent for my mom and the kids later. Because even if you can bring a whole community together, you can’t raise kids in formaldehyde-laced trailers in the middle of nowhere.
Best. post. Evar! You make some great points, and I agree with your assessment:
Got me.
DA: humour me. explain to me, in my “rank stupidity”, how people without cars and without access to public transportation are supposed to hold down jobs. did you miss the part in the article where the bus schedule was explained? it’s not possible, under those circumstances, for someone to hold down a full-time job — particularly not when they’re already so hard for people in that area to get. i know some people can commute by bike. i commute by bike. i only have a six-mile ride, round trip. they’d have to bike a hell of a lot farther than that.
for fuck’s sake, is it impossible for you to think that maybe, just maybe, the deck is stacked against the victims of katrina? just a bit? that shrugging your shoulders (even if sympathetically) and saying that the only solution is to build their own fucking community from scratch is not helpful? maybe jonah goldberg thought he was being helpful when he suggested the population of new orleans grow gills, but he came off like an asshat. it’s something to bear in mind. (and, no, before you get all huffy, i am not absolutely equating you with jonah. although you are being an asshat.)
res brought up your site, sure. but then you kept defending it with link-spam. again, i’m not fucking calling you a monster. you called yourself that. but eight posts of NO NO GO LOOK AT WHAT I WROTE GO LOOK HERE! comes off a bit defensive, and frankly, i don’t fucking care what your justifications are. style yourself whatever the hell you want.
nor did i call your beliefs “warped”. perhaps you misparsed. that modifier was meant for phelps. my “fee-fees”, as you put it, are not hurt by your brave and noble defence of the poor and helpless phelps, beaten down as he is by the iron fist of totalitarian thoughtpolicing. go ahead and champion the little shitstain if you want. i’m sorry i’m not applauding you loudly enough, o brave saviour of the first amendment. i’m simply of the mind that a barrier or a restraining order against a screeching lunatic is not going to cause the free world to implode — much in the same way that preventing employers for firing people because of their orientation is not unduly oppressive to the homophobes among us, and much in the same way that prosecuting other hate crimes has not destroyed the right of free expression.
explain to me…
Um, I really think “smile and nod, then ignore” really needs to start happening. Someone thinks they’re a trailblazer, lighting the way to reason, and hey, that’s just…great…
Bless your heart, DA!
Ahem…
DA, I work with the homeless in the US. Urban homeless. Even with the resources I and my colleagues in a couple of dozen different agencies in the area offer, for some people, getting housed is literally impossible. They are literally using every ounce of energy and every moment of time and every resource available, but it’s not possible. That isn’t true for all of my clients, but the vast majority are using tremendous amounts of energy to get their needs met, even with mental illnesses, even with addictions, even with significant mental and physical disabilities, or with combinations of all three.
While the urban homeless have the disadvantage of not having a place to call their own (and trust me, that’s a significant advantage), they do have the advantage of living in an area where transportation is relatively easy to obtain (and by relatively, I mean “sometimes possible”) and jobs are relatively easy to obtain (also “sometimes possible”).
What I am saying is that sometimes a person’s state is not in any way her fault. These guys have exhausted every resource they have, and they don’t have any more resources. NADA. Zip. Nothing. It is incumbent on the rest of us to step up and demand that they be rescued from the situation our government put them into.
To say, as your fellow Canadian said, that complaining to the government does no good, is a very convenient way of sitting back smugly and saying “I’ve done my share, now they need to work”. The First Nations people have resources that the Katrina refugees do not. Their families are intact. They are in an environment familiar to them in a community which, if not necessarily friendly to them, is at least used to them and not actively trying to drive them out.
A generation ago, the Civil Rights movement rescued US blacks from the despair of permanent, hopeless segregation and second class citizenship. (Granted, a LOT more work to do). This generation may have to rescue the poverty class in general (and Katrina refugees in particular) from a government which has decided that their “lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” don’t matter as much as the rest of ours do.
In 1990, I was making well under 10k per year, as a single mother fleeing a domestic violence situation. I was able to get daycare, college grants, a job that (barely) paid bills, affordable housing without a 2-3 year waiting list, Medicaid, food stamps that rewarded me rather than penalized me for working and going to school, and pull myself out of poverty. It took six years of sustained effort with periods of despair and contraction. It took a strong social network who helped me with the demands of single motherhood. If it weren’t for that network and the generosity of a landlord that believed me when I said I’d pay my rent when I got my next student loan check, I would have been homeless during that time.
I had significant advantages over the Katrina refugees, and it took everything I had to pull out. My best friend from those days still lives under the poverty level. Most of the women I knew in those days didn’t ever get past a paycheck to paycheck existence. I’m telling you again, they’ve done their part. They have worked their asses off just to survive. Now it’s time for us to do ours.
Yes, I took it personally when you attacked the commenters at Pandagon for their lack of action. You meant it personally. You meant to chide us for daring to ask for help on the behalf of people you feel have not done enough. You meant for us to feel guilty for daring to have lives while we worry about other peoples’ lives. Sorry, DA, it doesn’t work that way. Anyone with any experience in activism knows that self-care is the first step.
Step back for a minute and really listen. What we are saying to you is that you’re assuming that they have not used all their resources. What we are saying to you is that, like most other people in dire poverty, they have. They’re tapped out. If we want that well to flow again, we need to prime the pump.
I’m sure DA has a great biography in which HE triumphed over adversity so everybody else should, too. Simple as that.
Leigh, thank you for your helpful comments and the info. I am a big fan of ACORN; they have a good mix of advocacy, grassroots activism, and philanthropy. Thanks as well for the mention of H.R. 1227 and S. 1668, the Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Acts.
Folks, let’s leave DA’s blog alone. In fact, let’s just let the dead horse be. I think Leigh is right–we can and should channel our energy into making change. We’ve rebutted every bootstrap point made.
Jesus Christ, all these libertarian posts make me feel sick to my stomach.
Sheezlebub (and everyone),
Thank you! For the comments and the listening and the add’l posting on this info. Oh, I am just so pleased right now.
The second anniversary of Katrina is Wed, Aug 29, 2007. I am giving a talk in Boston about a week before to volunteers (Boston Cares, maybe?) about why we should still care about Katrina. You all have demonstrated that I’d be preaching to the choir here about this. This is the national energy and spirit that is so crucial to match the commitment Gulf residents have made to repairing their lives.
Keep agitating everyone!!
Yay.
Elite Pandogonian Threading Team:
Is that the same (banned) Bryan or a different one?…
You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you ain’t got no boots, DA.
Aw, Bryan’s back to wish death on people…Yay froggies!!!!
[…] Pandagon: Easy, Quick Action You Can Take Right Now To Help Katrina Survivors And read this post by Sheelzebub, while you’re at it. […]
I meant Indian as in people from India. Just saying…
I am struck by how much this thread is like certain conversations about rape, in which there is impassioned debate between people arguing that rapists, in their vileness, are immune to moral persuasion and so women need to change their behavior so as to avoid or outfight them, and people arguing that this is rape-apology victim-blaming and that rapists must be held accountable for their crimes and that it is profoundly anti-woman to suggest that women change their behavior because of rapists. This is a point of such major contention that it will derail any conversation in which it comes up. I personally think that it does make more sense to think about action that can be taken by the thoughtful, aware, motivated persons in a situation than the thoughtless, corrupt, criminal persons… it’s not about fault or responsibility, it’s just about potential.
I personally think that it does make more sense to think about action that can be taken by the thoughtful, aware, motivated persons in a situation than the thoughtless, corrupt, criminal persons…
And in the end, it changes nothing. Rapists still rape, and our government still treats people like trash we can forget. I would say that the assumption that women can do something special and never-tried-before to end rape is equivalent to the idea that giving the government the finger and finding resources that people don’t have to break out of poverty and a horrific situation as shown here are equivalent, and equally useless.
But hey, dreams are awesome, and koalas are cute and stuff, so yeah.
I would say that the assumption that women can do something special and never-tried-before to end rape is equivalent to the idea that giving the government the finger and finding resources that people don’t have to break out of poverty and a horrific situation as shown here are equivalent, and equally useless.
Jesus, proofread. Should read:
As a victim of Rita, I just need to say a few things. Some may have been touched on already, or not. First: I’m so sick of hearing how those Cajuns of SWLA (ie us) didn’t look for handouts or for government help. BS! We filed our FEMA claims like everyone affected. We fought our insurance companies too…even though they had fewer reasons to fight—filth buggers. Nevermind how more people per capita in SWLA refused to evacuate…even AFTER Katrina..than those in New Orleans, many of whom didn’t *choose* to stay behind (my dad’s whole 79 years, he never evacuated….until Rita…and only because of Katrina. The people who stayed behind for Rita, a Cat 5 storm, were rural folk, all with transportation to evacuate…but they are the “heroes” in this story???? Not to harsh on my friends and neighbors who chose to stay…but *I* get that. The media never once pointed out the relative stupidity of Rita stay-at-homers vs. Katrina “too-lazy-to-leavers.”) Never mind that people in Hackberry and Cameron owned boats (as opposed to the urban population of Louisiana’s then-largest city) and were equipped to search-and-rescue after the storm. And let’s forget that FEMA only allotted $2000 PER HOUSEHOLD, whether that household consisted of one or ten people. (Sure, there was some fraud…mostly from people who didn’t even live in the affected areas.)
As for banding together for groceries or jobs….or using public transport. FYI, the main public transportation in NOLA, the Canal St. streetcar, is still not running, and isn’t projected to for at least another year. Besides, it’s not like evacuees are living anywhere near the carline. What about the FEMA park behind my brother’s house in rural Scott, LA? We’re talking a 10+ mile walk just to get to a busline. Yeah, these people don’t want to work…well, if given a chance, most would jump at it.
You can’t make a situation impossible for people and then blame them for not achieving YOUR goals! Find me one affordable apartment in New Orleans. Sure, if you’re looking to spend $200,000+ on a condo, you’ve got plenty of choices. But when the artists are being forced out of the Quarter and Marignay because of the high rents, how do you expect a former dishwasher to be able to find reasonable housing? And I’ll only just mention the influx of undocumented workers into the area (thanks Bush no-bid contractors.)
How about the fact that many displaced New Orleanians (from the Lower Ninth Ward for example) WERE homeowners…just living in generational family homes that had long since been paid for and therefore carried no or little insurance? (Or those who were told they weren’t on a “flood plane” and therefore carried no additional flood insurance?)
And to think that the people of New Orleans have not been pulling themselves up “by their bootstraps”???? What else do you think they’ve been doing? They haven’t been depending on Insurance Companies to pay what they owe (they won’t) or on The Road Home Program (s-l-o-w) or the Federal Government/Army Corps of Engineers to take responsibility and actually build Cat 5 levees (”The science is still out on Category 5 levees”–says GWB, that scientific mind that thinks ID is a scientific theory) Hell, they won’t even rebuild the levees to the level they were SUPPOSED to have been (but obviously were not) before Katrina (FYI, Katrina was a Cat 3, not Cat 5, storm when it sent it’s storm surge up river and destroyed the NO levees. The levees were rated for a Cat 3. Thank Goddess it wasn’t a direct hit.)
Listen up babies…every coastal state is a Hurricane magnet. Just because Rhode Island hasn’t been hit yet doesn’t mean it won’t be. If you think the Bushies will be there for you, remember this: Bush wasn’t even there for his “home state” of Texas after Rita (of course, it mostly his the Black areas, so who cares, right?)
In the meantime, deny Louisiana and New Orleans to your own detriment. Baltimore: think you can keep providing those crabs with the majority of them come from Louisiana? How ’bout that oil we like to mine in the Gulf of Mexico and refine in Louisiana?
New Orleans is where it is because it needs to be there. It was the ONLY reason the Louisiana Purchase happened. Start treating us with some respect.
Cuz we’re more than happy to let you all starve to death in the dark.
Hell, I heard the people of Coffeeville whining about the mold in their homes a week after their flood. How would they have felt if they were barred from returning for several months like the people of New Orleans?….And I’ll bet they don’t even see a parallel.
Hate to be a pill, but a very cynical, sadistic part of me just prays for a Cat 5 to hit the upper east coast. I’m just curious how “blame the victim” America will be if it were to hit Baltimore, or Philly, or Manhattan. I don’t actually want that to happen, but I’m really curious to see if our government response would be different if it hit a “real city.” I still agree with Ashley and Oyster…we’d have been better off if terrorists has just bombed the levees.
Listen up babies…every coastal state is a Hurricane magnet. Just because Rhode Island hasn’t been hit yet doesn’t mean it won’t be.
I believe RI was hit in the thirties (I think). There was some major flooding and loads of damage.
Also, for those who think that NOLA is on a swamp and shouldn’t be rebuilt, remember this: most coastal cities are also at risk. Boston’s on a freaking salt marsh. Just saying.
… And Washington is more than just a political swamp. Just saying…..
[…] The “Bush is a heartless bastard” outrages: Bush vetoes an extension of the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program, demonstrating once again that for him the phrase “pro-life” means, “pro-life, unless there’s money involved.” Also, there are still more than 44,000 New Orleans families who have not been resettled, two years after their homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The Bush administration has not built affordable housing in New Orleans, and has not assisted these former residents in finding affordable housing in other communities. […]