THE New Orleans Thread (merged)

cynthia · Heavy Crude Joined: May 29, 2005 Posts: 382

The book, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in its Disaster Zone, by Joshua Clark gave me a different perspective from what the MSM offers on NO.

Clark takes the reader through both Katrina and Rita, while he stays as a steadfast resident and journalist. He was interviewed several times by NPR's Neil Conan and wrote (heavily edited-he later realized after electricity was restored) articles published by Salon.Com.

Clark offers a firsthand POV of what it was and is like to be in NO since those fateful events. He ends on a Save-the-Wetlands soap box. But he's allowed. (I disallow his overuse of the word, susurrus. More than once in an entire memoir is overkill. I counted at least six uses and guess it was closer to twelve).

Some of the survival strategies he and others employed would be of interest to this board.

Water, ice and food are a constant concern. Clark travels with a Radio Shack tape recorder capturing interviews as he negotiates electicity for his laptop from a sympathetic rescue pod. He boozes his way through a deteriorating romantic relationship while making sense of what has happened to his world.

I once had a tiny taste of what it is like to be displaced by flooding. I was surrounded by low income people with many dysfunctions in rural Oregon at the time. We had enough resources to avoid the FEMA scene. We were not in a flood zone but in a heavily logged area that was overcome by heavy rainfall. Eye opening. It was paradise until TSHTF.

There is an "underground" faction of youth who see NO as the New Frontier and they are going there to live. Certainly as squatters which we all know is "unAmerican." Our 19 yo son thought of joining them but has postponed his plans. We said, "Go for Mardi Gras. " and he said, "What's that?"

"Show us your ***? This thread shows an attitude that emphasizes the ass in bias.
cynthia

[i]

Dry · Tar Sands Joined: Dec 10, 2007 Posts: 23

lock and load ! Fire center of mass at the fat welfare belly

uNkNowN ElEmEnt

big_rc

big_rc

big_rc

Thank God for Naomi Klein!! She does a pretty good job of explaining what is going on in NO. After you read this, please explain to me who has the biggest "entitlement mentality", the poor, black people trying to survive or the wealthy who feel "entitled" to remake NO as they see fit.

Shock and Tasers in New Orleans

P.S. - Don't think this problem in uniquely a Louisiana thing. US housing is about to turn into an ungodly mess of haves and have-nots.
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wisconsin_cur

I don't know that there is anything that makes the rich feel any less "entitled" than the poor. You only have to look at the homes of the rich whcih need to be insured by the government because no private company will underwrite it (barrier islands and others). The people most likely to complain about the state of our roads are those who grumble the most about paying for them.

this does not mean that the poor are not also entitiled, only that the psychological reality is an equal opportunity affliction.

Unfortunatly, the disease is ubiquitous here in the west. The only hope we have of seeing it brought under control is the fact that it may soon mutate into a fatal form, forcing the immune system to defeat the disease or killing the host. Until we can bring the vector that exposes the population to the viral effects of entitlement under control, it will continue to ravage the globe.
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“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

"The time has come for men to act like men; and for women, well, to act a lot more like men."
-Ma Cur

Loki · Expert Joined: Apr 08, 2006 Posts: 1298 Location: Cascadia

If you watch the video of these protests, most of the agitators are white. I've heard ~100% of the actual residents of these projects are black. It's not the poor blacks causing problems and getting tazed, it's probably middle-class white leftists using this as an excuse to "rail against the system." Their idiotic histrionics will probably only hurt poor blacks, but who cares when you can feel all self-righteous and crap.

Ferretlover

I can't help but wonder why some of NO's residents are such slow learners.... After seeing what Katrina (and other storms in the past) have done to the city, why would anyone in their right mind want to live at or below sea level?
Instead of new public housing, perhaps TPTB should consider public houseboats.....
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"RRrrruuuunnnn!!!" ~Apocalypto

Denny

I have often wondered why cities ever got into the public housing business in the first place. When I was a kid in a Toronto suburb, our town had no public housing, and that worked out okay. Now if you look at Toronto, the city has lots of assets tied up in public housing, as have most North American cities and they collect less money from these than it costs to run them. So, they not only get zero return on the "investment", it actually loses public money. You'd at least think that they could enlist the tenants to maintain these buildings, but I guess that wold take just too much responsibility on the part of the residents and too much effort for the city workers to organize. .

The residents seem to have little incentive to keep their apartments in good condition. Instead you see sloth and neglect. I notice that everywhere with public housing. I think it just creates an escape hatch mentality. If smaller places get by with no public housing, why not big places too? For instance, if one visits Newfoundland, the poorest province Canada, one is struck at how neighbors and family help each other out and while you see large homes and small, very humble homes, they all seem to be well maintained and decorated. It stands in sharp contrast to the rough side of New Orleans, just outside the French Quarter which I visited a few years back this time of year. In some neighborhoods of what looked like the projects, I saw fencing designed to stop residents from throwing trash and the like from balconies to the street. I didn't see Christmas decorations. Very depressing. I did see lots of people just shuffling around, pushing shopping carts with miscellaneous junk around. Its like a vast mental hosptial ward.

Naomi Klein I'm sure means well, there are a lot of big money interests seeking to reap benefits from the New Orleans tragedy. But given her well heeled past, and her good work ethic, she does not seem to realize that the best benefit society can give the poor is a sense of self sufficiency, even if it must be forced on them. With the exception of the invalids and sick, we need to develop a system of workfare for public support and maintain strict standards of cleanliness and maintenance by residents affected. Reality therapy. Perhaps, that way, public housing could become self sufficient and it may even attract private funding interest.

Or, perhaps its better for poor people to live in a rural environment, where they can fish, hunt and garden to supplement their poor income. Rural people seem to have a sense of community and perhaps the poor city people can pick this quality up.

TommyJefferson

Arkwright · Tar Sands Joined: Jan 01, 2005 Posts: 89 Location: Finland

/offtopic
Fascism is such a useless term these days. So many definitions for it and no-one usually says what meaning they are using. Some I know people have used:

fascism is
a) attitude of people who wants sticter control over society
b) marxist definition: supporters of ruling class who engage in violence are fascist
c) general leftist term to slander whoever thinks differently
d) the historical Italian movement
e) economical arragement where goverment rules for the benefit of big corporations
f) everyone on the loser side of ww2
g) members of police and those who symphatise with them

And now this is new one for me.
h) share our wealth movement as fascism

cube · Fusion Joined: Mar 12, 2005 Posts: 3823

eastbay

David Duke.

Need I comment further?

Say what you will, but the guy went from zero to fluent in Russian in about three months. Truly amazing. That is no small accomplishment.

I tried like crazy during my few months to crack that strange language and got to about a 1 on a 0-5 scale with fluent=5. I
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larry00 · Coal Joined: Aug 17, 2007 Posts: 9

Well I guess the dice have been rolled and now the Electricity is on again in the 9th ward in New Orleans.

Wasn't just a month ago.

Personally I wouldn't live below sea level!
I wonder if the Government relented about raising the houses 6 ft. or no money to rebuild.

I doubt it they most likely caved !