- It was 2:00 am and I couldn't sleep. The house was quiet
as I stood at the screen door taking in the whisper of the trees [they
only talk at night], the smells of a brief summer shower, and the sounds
of crickets singing peace on earth. I stood there in the dark and I cried.
-
- In the hush of a New England summer night, all seemed
well with the world. New Orleans and the devastation of the Gulf States
seemed to exist outside of time. I cried because I couldn't get the imagery
out of my mind of the suffering humanity in the South. I had just finished
reading, The Times Picayune, and going through their galley of photographs,
of the tragedy in New Orleans [not shown on news]. On Aug 31, 2005,
it was reported: "At 91 years old, Booker Harris ended his days propped
on a lawn chair, covered by a yellow quilt and abandoned, dead, in front
of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. "
-
- "Mr. Harris died in the back of a Ryder panel truck,
as he and his 93-year-old wife, Allie, were evacuated from eastern New
Orleans. The truck's driver deposited [like garbage] Allie and her husband's
body on the Convention Center Boulevard. And there it remained. With so
much need and so few resources, [in Super Power, U.S.A.] the weakest and
frailest were bound to suffer the most. Seated next to her husband's body,
93 year old Allie Harris munched on crackers, seemingly unaware of all
the tragedy unfolding around her." I cried thinking of a frail
old Black woman munching on crackers with her spouse dead in a lawn chair!
-
- I thought of the other pictures, which showed the elderly,
and wheelchair bound nursing home patients, left on an over-pass in the
baking New Orleans sun. I watched a newscast of a Black woman sobbing
inconsolably because her husband had died due to lack of oxygen. Thousands
of people are still stranded in attics, on rooftops, and various housing
projects throughout the town. Surrounded by water, some of it 20 feet deep,
they are screaming and crying to helicopters to HELP THEM. I don't suppose
President Bush on his fly-over in Air Force One, [gas-$6,030.00 an hour]
back from vacation, could see this? He wouldn't know that doctors
and nurses have been calling into news stations begging for help. They
are trapped with their patients in various hospitals, with no water, no
electricity and their emergency generators out of gas. FEMA and the
contingency of some 180,000 Homeland Defense personnel will not arrive
in time for the many that are dying. Bodies are lying in the streets.
-
- As the levees broke on Tues, Aug 30, 2005, trapping the
poor, handicapped, elderly, and youngsters, in an Apocalypse scenario;
President Bush was at the Naval Base, in Coronado, California, celebrating
V - J Day. While refugees of, the beaded Mardi Gras, celebrations
of old, stood in torrential rains, waiting to enter the Superdome; President
Bush strummed on a guitar, presented to him at the VJ ceremony by
Mark Wills. I thought of the elderly Harris couple dumped on a New
Orleans street, and wondered if he was singing Mark's song, "Wish
You Were Here"?
-
- "Wish you were here, wish you could see this place/Wish
you were near, I wish I could touch your face/The weather's nice, in paradise/It's
summertime all year and all the folks we know/They say, 'Hello', I miss
you so, wish you were here".
-
- I thought of The Times Picayune, article, of June 8th-2004.
"For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but
stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees,
a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms
that won't be finished for at least another decade. Mervin Morehier, who
manages the 'Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity' levee project for the Army
Corps of Engineers, says, 'I can't tell you exactly what that could mean
this hurricane season if we get a major storm. It would depend on the path
and speed of the storm, the angle that it hits us. But I could tell you
we would be better off if the levees were raised..and I think it's important
and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status
of these projects."
-
- "The Bush administration's proposed fiscal 2005
budget includes only $3.9 million for the east bank hurricane project.
'The challenge now, said emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri in
Jefferson Parish and Terry Tullier in New Orleans, is for southeast Louisiana
somehow to persuade those who control federal spending that protection
from major storms and flooding are matters of homeland security'"
-
- "'It appears that the money has been moved in the
president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and
I suppose that's the price we pay," Maestri said. "Nobody
locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything
we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.' Levee-raising
is only part of the flood-related work that has stopped since the federal
government began reducing Corps of Engineers appropriations in 2001, as
more money was diverted to homeland security, the fight against terrorism
and the war in Iraq."
-
- "The New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers bore the brunt of a record $71.2 million reduction in federal
funding for fiscal year 2006. The Bush administration has been cutting
funding for federal disaster relief funds since 2001. FEMA's Project Impact,
a model mitigation program has been cancelled outright. Federal funding
of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property
from the next disaster has been cut in half. Communities across the country
must now compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars."
-
- "The Bush administration's move to merge FEMA [not
being told by the media jm], with Homeland Security meant that the two
had to compete for funding. Much of the Netherlands lies below sea
level and after the 1953 flood which killed 1,800 people; the Dutch launched
a major flood prevention program called the Delta Plan. Engineers fortified
dykes and bolstered other water defenses against a future disaster and
there hasn't been one since." Paul Joseph Watson
-
- "Patricia McDonald Gomez of Aunt Sally's Original
Creole Pralines said, 'You're almost fatalistic. Living in a soup bowl
will do it to you, like Romans dancing while Nero fiddled and the city
burned' How do you rebuild the city of Stella, Blanche and Stanley,
the city that to William Faulkner was the 'labyrinthine mass of oleander
and jasmine, lantana and mimosa', the city of the Italianate mansions of
the Garden District and the teeming housing projects like the one where
the streetcar named Desire now arrives---a place that gave America most
of its music, much of its literature, a cracked mirror glimpse of America
exotica and a fair piece of its soul." New York Times
-
- And today, Sept 1, 2005, the city is imploding, and New
Orleans is drowning/burning. Prisoners [maybe a reason for all the
anarchy] were released from local jails. The editor of the Picayune, stated
last night on the news, that five levees are broken. Looting is widespread
with reports that some police have joined in the melee. Dr. Quigley from
Memorial Hospital, on the phone to the media last evening stated, "There
are no communications in the city between police, fire, and rescue personnel.
The hospital is full we've had to turn people away. The poor couldn't leave,
nor those in nursing homes, they had no means. Officials have advised citizens
to take a boat to the Interstate. These people don't have cars let along
boats. New Orleans has now become Haiti" It has also been reported
that the police have no transportation, communications, and food or water
themselves. One would be better off if they'd careened off a Vermont mountain,
into a ditch. At least in a world of GPS they'd be rescued!
-
- The National Guard lost total control of the Superdome,
and who can blame them? This was an untenable situation to put these men
in. They are soldiers' not trained social or medical workers. You
don't herd [mostly Blacks you might note] into a sports stadium with thousands
of; special needs, nursing home patients, group home residents, those with
chronic health needs, babies, and those who've lost everything, and
expect a day in the park. A disaster plan, is not corralling people
into arena seats, with the roof ripping off, no water, overflowing toilets,
and no electricity! There's bound to be 'trouble in River City', with this
explosive mixture of fear-despair-and physical trauma. I note that in this
colossal disaster; that the good Reverend Jackson, who always has his mini-rap
sermons ready for any occasion, is down in Venezuela being knighted or
whatever. He'll be back after dying time is over; to give his Monday
morning quarter-back sermon of how he would have handled things. I
think it's about time the good Reverend [after child support payments],
cough up some of the Rainbow millions he's extorted from corporate
America; and give it to the poor, hungry, thirsty, sick, and homeless,
like the good Word says !
-
- With the billions, upon billions, being spent for;
weapons, rockets, missiles, tanks, guns, prison camps, gas, clubs,
barbed wire, tsar guns, bunker busters, scanners, ships, planes, spy satellites,
fact finding missions to Bermuda, concrete barriers, cameras, Ninja
outfits, obscene political pensions/full health care, fleets of SUVs,
[armored-unlike Iraq vehicles], a Foggy Bottom Visitor's Center, exorbitant
salaries, et al; one would think that somewhere in all this, someone
might have thought about protecting the citizens [one of the few real jobs
of government-duh]. And now we have anarchy because of; ineptness,
stupidity and a legion of bureaucrats with their dumb ass volumes of policies,
procedures and agendas!
-
- I'm not sure what more it will take to awaken people
from their entrenched allegiance to an elephant and a jackass? The Democrats
are just as useless as the Republicans, like tits on a bull. They're all
slopping around in the public trough, grabbing what they can, for them
and theirs, and piss on the people----! This section of the country; Louisiana,
Mississippi, and Alabama are amongst the poorest in the nation. Gosh-just
everyone can't be a blackjack dealer, in a Mississippi riverboat casino.
The shacks in the shadows of these temples of greed are destroyed. God
help the poor here [like New Orleans], who wanted to leave and begged store
owners for gas money [to no avail]. Moral being: Mandatory or not if you're
poor you die. A life lost for want of a tank of gas. One would think, that
the corporate oil hucksters, who've realized BILLIONS in profits
these past few years, plus BILLIONS in subsidies, might have given
these folks FREE GAS..as a patriotic gesture mind you. No matter now.they're
buried somewhere in the rubble.
-
- "Great Babylon is come up before me", shuddered
Andrew Jackson's wife Rachel upon encountering New Orleans a century and
a half ago. "Oh, the wickedness, the idolatry of this place."
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