Have a Hurricane Party

[priceyfatprude]

They have declared Martial Law in NOLA, meaning, if you are caught doing something wrong (looting, stealing, etc) you will be shot. No questions asked. They are not tolerating it any more.

There have been well-meaning people who have taken chests of ice from Lafayette to Baton Rouge--and got carjacked for their efforts.

They are evacuating all government buildings in Baton Rouge.

He just left work to go get his daughter. He might be going to TN with her until everything blows over.

If anyone wants to contact him or give him a message, he says to do so through me until further notice. He thanks you for your kind wishes & good vibes.

[bealeblues]

our internet has just been restored in the last few hours.

new orleans is a catastrophic. you already knew that though
baton rouge has over 200K additional people, but so far, reports of riots and unrest are unfounded. i drove over there a little while ago, and all appeared ok.
lafayette (about 2 1/2 hours from NO) is getting crowded, but reports of unrest here are also unfounded.
J's father and her sister, both slidell residents, lost everything. and i mean everything.
lil'beale is fine, but when i said i was taking her back to lafayette with me, J's father looked at me with tears in his eyes and asked me not to take her from him too. obviously, i let her stay.
i have not yet heard or been able to reach my friend matt who lives in NO.

south louisiana as you knew it no longer exists

[jasmina]

that sounds horrific. I hope things work out as best they can at this stage.

[Klynne]

Beale,

I am glad that you and little Beale are ok. I hope your friend is ok. My heart goes out to J's family. I am going to donate some money for the cause. I just have to figure out which agency to donate to.

My thoughts are with you and everyone that has been affected by this tragedy.

[priceyfatprude]

Do yourselves a favor.

If you live in the States.

Do not watch the news.



You must trust me on this.

[amanda]

beale-

at a loss for words, but I'm very happy to hear that you and lil'beale are safe. thanks for taking the time to check in with us funked-up monkeys- I know several less-visible folks have been worried about you.

keep us updated when you can. my deepest hope of a speedy recovery to you and yours.

~a

[Smartypants]

Originally Posted by priceyfatprude

Do yourselves a favor.

If you live in the States.

Do not watch the news.



You must trust me on this.

^^ Peef, I could NOT disagree with you more.

WATCH WATCH WATCH. Become outraged. Wake up.

Of course, watch with the caveat to always keep in mind that the news isn't complete, despite its nonstop coverage, and that it tends to focus on the most sensational. Don't accept that any "breaking news" is true until it's confirmed in a number of places.

But, if you took away the "sensationalized" stuff from this story what do you think is left? Happy people who haven't been completely short-changed by the country's leadership? There's a lot more to what's happening in New Orleans than people suffering. The reasons they're suffering are the lasting lesson here, and the pain of watching their suffering is the unfortunate avenue to learning it.

This is no time to turn away from the horrific story playing out on TV news because it might make us sad. This is a time that we all may once and for all get a clearer picture of what it means to be truly poor -- or worse, poor and black -- in America, and how utterly without worth the poor are held, and with what contempt.

The world is watching this. I certainly hope Americans will, too.

[zero]

metafilter thread where they're discussing washington post pictures

o

[Smartypants]

From the NY Times (apropos of my earlier post):

September 2, 2005

From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy

By DAVID GONZALEZ

The scenes of floating corpses, scavengers fighting for food and desperate throngs seeking any way out of New Orleans have been tragic enough. But for many African-American leaders, there is a growing outrage that many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy were people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society.

The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive.

"If you know that terror is approaching in terms of hurricanes, and you've already seen the damage they've done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God's name were you thinking?" said the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "I think a lot of it has to do with race and class. The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people."

In the days since neighborhoods and towns along the Gulf Coast were wiped out by the winds and water, there has been a growing sense that race and class are the unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck. Just as in developing countries where the failures of rural development policies become glaringly clear at times of natural disasters like floods or drought, many national leaders said, some of the United States' poorest cities have been left vulnerable by federal policies.

"No one would have checked on a lot of the black people in these parishes while the sun shined," said Mayor Milton D. Tutwiler of Winstonville, Miss. "So am I surprised that no one has come to help us now? No."

The subject is roiling black-oriented Web sites and message boards, and many black officials say it is a prime subject of conversation around the country. Some African-Americans have described the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina as "our tsunami," while noting that there has yet to be a response equal to that which followed the Asian tragedy.

Roosevelt F. Dorn, the mayor of Inglewood, Calif., and the president of the National Association of Black Mayors, said relief and rescue officials needed to act faster.

"I have a list of black mayors in Mississippi and Alabama who are crying out for help," Mr. Dorn said. "Their cities are gone and they are in despair. And no one has answered their cries."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said cities had been dismissed by the Bush administration because Mr. Bush received few urban votes.

"Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response," Mr. Jackson said, after meeting with Louisiana officials yesterday. "I'm not saying that myself, but what's self-evident is that you have many poor people without a way out."

In New Orleans, the disaster's impact underscores the intersection of race and class in a city where fully two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.

Spencer R. Crew, president and chief executive officer of the national Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, said the aftermath of the hurricane would force people to confront inequality.

"Most cities have a hidden or not always talked about poor population, black and white, and most of the time we look past them," Dr. Crew said. "This is a moment in time when we can't look past them. Their plight is coming to the forefront now. They were the ones less able to hop in a car and less able to drive off."

That disparity has been criticized as a "disgrace" by Charles B. Rangel, the senior Democratic congressman from New York City, who said it was made all the worse by the failure of government officials to have planned.

"I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence, Mr. Rangel said, adding that the danger to the levees was clear.

"I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich," he said.

Outside Brooklyn Law School yesterday, a man selling recordings of famous African-Americans was upset at the failure to have prepared for the worst. The man, who said his name was Muhammad Ali, drew a damning conclusion about the failure to protect New Orleans.

"Blacks ain't worth it," he said. "New Orleans is a hopeless case."

Among the messages and essays circulating in cyberspace that lament the lost lives and missed opportunities is one by Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx.

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?" Mr. Naison wrote. "If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions."

That sentiment was shared by members of other minority groups who understand the bizarre equality of poverty.

"We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random," said Martín Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts and poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto Rican. "Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino."

This Sunday there will be prayers. In pews from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast, the faithful will come together and pray for those who lived and those who died. They will seek to understand something that has yet to be fully comprehended.

Some may talk of a divine hand behind all of this. But others have already noted the absence of a human one.

"Everything is God's will," said Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. "But there's a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things."

That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve of crisis.

"Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor," he said. "So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It's as simple as that."

[Smartypants]

From the NY Times:

September 2, 2005

A Can't-Do Government

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.

So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.

First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all.

There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.

Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"

Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.

Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain."

In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.

Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.

Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared."

I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

[RuneT]

It's on the news that people die from hunger. Can anyone comfirm this? How can this be? It's not like NO is on the other side of the world?

It's shocking to read about the insaninty, like shooting at helicopters, raping children etc going on. I hope they manage to evacuate and secure people soon.

[primenumber]

Society normally fails the needy. We can use technology to change governments, go to space, but we cannot organise relief in a great nation when mother nature stretches her muscles.

Our politicians should hang their heads in shame

[zenbabe]

we have no problem helping out any other country that has a problem, we just can't figure out how to help our own counrty.

don't buy gas if you don't need it....sage advise...

[Avalon]

Our politicians should hang their heads in shame

From what I have seen, most of them should just be hanged.

[novelty]

Originally Posted by Klynne

Beale,

I am going to donate some money for the cause. I just have to figure out which agency to donate to.

some suggestions:

Money, goods, stock, airline miles, it's all good: Red Cross

They rescue and shelter animals affected by disasters: Noahswish

Offer up your spare space: hurricanehousing

I have no relatives or friends directly affected by this tragic event, but karma is a powerful instigator.