Long Live the Krewe of Chartreuse
Guys. I will be watching over y’all today like a Holy Guardian Angel. I expect you to do this Mardi Gras thing right! Call me from the steps…
I love you!
Chinagrrrl
Archive for category nola
Goodbye New Orleans
In the New York Times… a decent article on how those people who love NOLA, are choosing to leave…because it’s not getting any better. Makes me sad…but I understand. I just wish I could do something to make it better.
Tweet this!New Orleans Really DID Disappear by Eugene Robinson, Washington Post columnist
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New Orleans really did disappear
More infuriating than anything George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address last week was what he didn’t say.
Congress and the nation heard nothing, zilch, nada, not a single, solitary word about New Orleans, the Gulf Coast and the devastation that remains from the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. A disaster that happened on his watch. How nice that the White House has been able to move beyond the trauma of September 2005 — wind and water, death and destruction, poverty and race, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Too bad the people of New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish, Pass Christian, Biloxi, Miss., and the rest of the coast will never have the luxury of forgetting. They can’t forget that, days after Hurricane Katrina made its tragic landfall, President Bush stood in New Orleans’ historic Jackson Square, while most of the city still lay beneath brackish floodwaters, and said that nature’s trials “remind us that we’re tied together in this life, in this nation — and that the despair of any touches us all.” Must have been a very light touch. That night, Bush promised that “we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities.” He vowed, “This great city will rise again.” Then, as usual, he acted as if saying something were enough to make it so. Bush said there was “no way to imagine America without New Orleans.” No imagination is needed — the New Orleans that we knew before the flood no longer exists. The remnant of a city that survives between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain has less than half the population of the New Orleans we used to know. Vast neighborhoods are still full of houses abandoned to mold and decay. Hundreds of thousands of residents still have no way to come home — or no home to return to. Vicious hoodlums have returned, however, and are preying on the diehards who never left and the pioneers who are doing the best to help the city rebuild. Yes, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have bought a house in New Orleans and say they will make the city their new home. But they’re likely to have better security than their neighbors. New Orleans was doomed not just by Hurricane Katrina, but by the failure of levees and flood walls that should have provided ample protection. The Army Corps of Engineers has worked day and night to patch the flood-control system, and if Katrina hit again tomorrow, most of the city should stay dry. But if a similar hurricane hit from a different angle — or, heaven forbid, a stronger hurricane hit from any angle — then what’s left of New Orleans likely would be destroyed. The man who inspired Bush’s immortal “Brownie” remark, Michael Brown, will go down in history as the Federal Emergency Management Agency director who botched the federal response to Katrina. But he intends to take others in the White House down with him. Speaking recently to a group of graduate students, Brown claimed he advised that the White House assert federal control of the disaster response in the whole affected area. “Certain people in the White House,” Brown said, wanted to “federalize” the response in Louisiana in order to embarrass Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, but avoid taking any steps in Mississippi that would cast Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, in an unfavorable light. Brown did not name the White House officials who were behind these alleged machinations. A White House spokesman denied Brown’s claims. I’m about as cynical as anyone about George W. Bush and his administration, but what I mostly saw in the days after Katrina was incompetence, not political gamesmanship. The scale of the disaster was almost unimaginable, and even if the federal government had done its job, lives would have been lost and the Gulf Coast left in ruins. What is unconscionable is that a president who fundamentally does not believe in government has allowed market forces to take the lead in the reconstruction effort, which ensures that the New Orleans he promised to rebuild is gone forever. A logjam of insurance claims, construction permits, flood maps and levee projects keeps things from moving forward. Business can’t function without workers; workers can’t come home if they have no place to live. What kind of president can see one of the nation’s greatest, most historic cities ruined, and not make its rebirth his highest priority? What kind of president gives a State of the Union and doesn’t even mention New Orleans? Robinson is a Washington Post columnist. |
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Tweet this!New Orleans residents to march Thursday
New Orleans residents to march Thursday
By STACEY PLAISANCE, Associated Press Writer
Thu Jan 11, 7:15 AM ET
NEW ORLEANS – Just before the New Year, the Hot 8 Brass Band lost its beloved drummer to the spate of recent violence in this struggling city that has already suffered nine deaths in 2007. The loss of Dinerral Shavers, 25, will be deeply felt by his bandmates as they lead a peace march Thursday demanding that the city take action against crime. The drummer was shot to death in front of his family on Dec. 28. City officials and the police announced a plan Tuesday to increase patrols and use checkpoints to crack down on criminals. Authorities made 12 arrests — including six on drug charges and one on a fugitive warrant — at the first traffic checkpoint set up after the plan was implemented.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco met Wednesday behind closed doors with officials of the state police and the National Guard, which have been supplementing New Orleans police patrols since June. “We are certainly all concerned about the implications of this high crime rate, this violent crime rate happening in the city,” Blanco said before the meeting. “It can have the impact of hurting our efforts toward recovery, toward economic recovery, in particular.” She said the plan unveiled by Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Warren Riley was solid.
The mayor’s office said Nagin had no plans to participate in Thursday’s march, which was slated to begin at the foot of Canal Street and end at City Hall. Police said many neighborhood organizations wanted to parade from different parts of the city hit by violence. One group planned to march from the pre-Katrina home of independent filmmaker Helen Hill, who was gunned down with her physician husband in the doorway of the couple’s new home in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood near the French Quarter. But police discouraged separate marches, saying they could pose traffic or security problems. “The NOPD doesn’t have enough officers to keep marchers coming from all over the city safe from traffic, etc.,” said an e-mail from Nadiene Van Dyke, of city councilman James Carter’s office. “They are now anticipating 2,000 to 3,000 people.”
Jennifer Reifert, a resident of the city’s Garden District, said she planned to participate in the march even though crime has been minimal in her section of town, where residents have hired a private security firm to patrol the streets. “This will make people aware that we’re tired of crime and we’re not going to take it anymore,” she said.
Tweet this!NOLA & Lord of the Flies (response)
These are the words of Loki . Recently married gentleman born and raised NOLA-style. He went back to NOLA as soon as possible after Katrina and dedicated himself and his resources to rebuilding. I read his blog “Humid City” every day in digest form by email. Over the past 15 months I’ve heard the futility and the frustration seeping into his words and today his post has spurned me to write.
He quoted another blog: Metroblogging New Orleans: Pondering and proximity, which states about another such poster who also has committed to stay and a “block-by-block” local action for the rebuild. These are intelligent, independent and committed individuals who love NOLA and believe in their heart-of-hearts that she needs to rise again. But I don’t think anyone though it would be this hard.
And it probably wouldn’t…but there is that quote that started this post:
“We have created a generation without remorse and given them a Mad Max style wasteland to live out their Lord of the Flies fantasies in.”
Indeed we have. I lived in New Orleans and love her city. I love her energy, her way of pushing people until they transcended their own humanity or left, or died. I love her music, her coagulation of the creative; artists, singers, performance and theater people. It was a carnival town as well as a carnivale town and all of the members from the side show, to the flying trapeze to the management were in residence in the off season.
New Orleans remains the only place I can say that I live with my heart wide open. No mask. On my two trips back since Katrina, as soon as my feet touched NOLA dirt there was a huge sigh of relief by my soul. It relaxed, and for the duration of my trip, I didn’t need to worry about keeping appearances up so that I would mix in with humanity. NOLA is a place that allows my wings to spread, my teeth to sharpen and my blood to run shimmeringly black. I love New Orleans and I want to protect her, but when I was there and talked she reminded me of a rape victim who wants to hide herself away from further trauma and to try and heal, but in that process something truly went wrong and she’s in this bad relationship with bad people who continue to hurt her.
I live in Ohio now and since 1998 I’ve tried to find an opening for my return to NOLA. I almost had it in 2005…and then the storm happened. Now I can’t find adequate housing for me and my 8 year old, even IF there were schools to educate her and jobs to help pay for it. NOLA is about as far away from being my place of residence as it can be…but it’s still home to my heart.
When I lived there were these sections of the city you just didn’t go. When I got shot, I got nudged into one of them. They were bad places filled with bad people, taught be bad people to be bad. The housing projects were such that they made the projects of Compton, CA look like country club resorts. Poverty was learned as an occupation. Hustling as the side game. I was very glad that I didn’t have to live in one of those places, but that didn’t prevent me from imagining what it was like, as a child to come of age in one of them. It would have been so removed from the American Dream.
When the Katrina fiasco was in full swing I remember hearing about the looting that was happening. Not just food and water, but clothes and entertainment items. It made perfect sense to me. If I had lived a whole life without having those sorts of things, and my mama has lived her whole life without them…and her mama. And all of a sudden the city’s closed down and the power is out and there are not security alarms or guards and the police has other things to worry about, then I would feel pretty damn justified in going and getting myself one of them boxes with a fancy TV. Sure, there isn’t any power, but there will be…and if there isn’t, I have something to sell to someone who has power. Either way, it’s all good by me.
I understand that underdog mentality. Couple that with the testosterone found in the 14-24 males growing up in those parts and you are right; It’s Lord of the Flies. The have found their Promised Land and they are doing what they know.
When I read about the founding of New Orleans I read about pirates and criminals and the miscreants of the New World. They stormed the city and founded it in their image. And it has always remained in the shadow of that foundation. That is one of the reasons it held our heart so tight.
Maybe in the rebuilding of New Orleans , another seizure of the city is happening by the criminals and pirates who would claim the city for their own?
And if that is the case, there are two options. Fight, using their rules, and beat them, then seize the city for your own, or leave the city to them. They will never go willingly. You are right. Most of them know the prison system and they are having too much fun. Once you have been to prison, there is always a part of you that operates on that logic. So…your rebuild efforts may be in vain, because even if you fix up every building to better than its original state, who is going to move there with that element running the outside world? And they have already proven they aren’t afraid to storm your house, kill you and take your shit.
So what is the answer? I don’t have one. I want my old New Orleans back too, but once squeezed out, the toothpaste is damn hard to get back inside to tube. Time is like that too! Things have changed. New Orleans isn’t what she used to be. There is an element that seeks to feed on her wounded body like a carrion bird, picking at her flesh when she is not yet dead. To those who would stay with her, I salute you, but I feel that unless you take the fight to a very visceral and mortal level, you will continue to feel frustrated as you watch them take her away, day by day.
Could a clear, strong, local government who is intolerant of the bullshit that has been happening make a difference? Yes, if supported by the community agencies of sheriff, police, and legal and community action to support those efforts. Right now everything is fragmented, and the vultures smell weakness.
Maybe someone should don a super-suit and a cape and become a modern-day super-hero. That is what I think we need…. A super-hero for lady Babylon!
Rise again lady New Orleans . Let me know what you need from me to aid you in any way. I miss you
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