Tag: Hurricane Katrina

Louisiana’s frustrating Road Home program continues to give the shaft to people who’ve worked all their lives and owned their homes, to lose them in New Orleans’ flooding and during Katrina and Rita. They’re being treated as common criminals complete with mug shots and fingerprinting when all they want is to rebuild their homes.

And New Orleans’ depleted health care system has been dealt another blow from BushCo-supported disaster capitalism.

So these stories need to get national attention, because they’re about things that could strangle the comeback of a beautiful, historic city.  

I understand per a cable news report I heard New Year’s Day that you have been completed renovating several homes for the poor in ….North Philadelphia. Which suggests to me that the need for affordable housing is a cause near and dear to your heart.

This is not to take away from the need there, but right now there’s another American city, struggling for her survival, where people are suffering, which needs your help….

After Katrina” is a haunting, evocative chronicle by Chris Rose, through his Times-Picayune columns, of his own life and that of a New Orleans not only struggling to recover but to survive. Not in chronological order but arranged by theme, the columns start with Sept. 1, 2005 and end with Dec. 31, 2006.

As he often speaks for a Louisiana in pain, Rose eloquently describes not only the surrealness of her post-Katrina landscape but also some intriguing, often eccentric characters he meets in his beloved city and his own descent into the private hell of depression–and that of those around him. “1 Dead In Attic” should be required reading for anyone who wants to know what life in New Orleans after what Rose often calls “the Thing” was, and still is, like from the inside.

Overcovered in a shameless play to the cheap seats for at least the past three days has been the fatal attack Christmas Day on 17-year-old Carlos Susa and two others who were injured by Tatiana, a Siberian tiger at the San Francisco zoo.

Not to discount Carlos’ family’s tragedy, just pointing out how this has gotten to be a real media circus with media whores coming out of the woodwork to use it as a way to get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.

because of a situation that has been weighing heavliy on my mind. Bear with me for not feeling up to posting an upbeat post-Christmas diary.

For I am heartsick over the news of what happened in New Orleans a week ago, Thursday. I won’t extensively go into what happened because this has already been excellently done in  NOLA: Stun Guns Used As Bulldozers Stand Ready and This Is A National Issue.

However, I will go into several other aspects of what happened, which are deeper, more complex, and more personal than what the mainstream media did in their brief reports and soundbites.

Heartbreaking is the story of Nataline Sarkysian, the 17-year-old for whom CIGNA denied payment for a liver transplant, then reversed its decision when it was too late. My intent here is not to focus on this, because it already has been well-diaried, but to bring up a stunning parallel between this human tragedy and what has been happening to New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana.

PG-13 version crossposted a la grande orange and at the Blue House.

The day after Christmas, I’m heading back to the Gulf Coast for a week

with the volunteers. If The Muse doesn’t run out on me, this will be the first in a series of short and easy reads on what it all means. Or doesn’t.

This trip came about because we had some money left over from the last one.

After three trips with no skills other than strong backs, it was becoming pretty clear that unless we could kick it up a notch, there wouldn’t be much use in returning.  

Recently commonscribe posted a simple plea entitled: 14,000 in FEMA trailers on the Gulf. Finish The Job. That post sparked some ideas that are worthy of discussion for the entire group,  it also sparked the following interview:

(discussion follows interview)

This will be commonscribe’s third visit to help rebuild homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so who better to ask about what is needed than one of our own?

NLOB:   Why did you get involved?

commonscribe:   It was more productive than screaming at the TV. Seriously.

a l’orange aussi.

With federal relief money still bottlenecked in the system and 14,000 residents displaced by Katrina about to go through their third winter in FEMA trailers or tents, the housing charities of Mississippi are trying to raise $300 million dollars to Finish The Job of getting these people back into permanent housing. There’s more after the jump.

Rather than write another diary on the second anniversary of Katrina, I thought I’d provide a set of resources for people who are interested in reading more, and from a diverse set of viewpoints.  These are newspapers, political blogs, and personal stories, and together they help fill in the giant web of impact that Katrina had on this country, and the distance we’ve come since, and the distance we still need to go.

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmists! (do we have a group name yet?)  This is a crosspost of my dailykos series, profiling famous and not-so-famous names in literary history.  Last week we spent time in West Africa with the former president of Senegal, who also happened to be a cultural theorist and excellent poet.  Our subject this week was also involved with politics, although on a much more modest scale: he was friend and informal adviser to Czechoslovakia’s first elected president, Tomáš Masaryk. 

Since the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina two years ago this week, one of this author’s novels has become uncomfortable to read, because he had once imagined in agonizing detail the destruction of the Gulf Coast due to humanity’s meddling with nature.  Join me below for an extended discussion with a true visionary, and one of the foremost liberal humanists of the 20th century.

This week marks the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, an anniversary we’d be wise to commemorate.  If history is all about lessons learned, then the complete breakdown of local, state, and federal government – the complete inability of the world’s wealthiest nation to rescue its own citizens in a disaster that had been well anticipated – should provide us with the best possible classroom for future change.

Two years later, has anything substantial changed?  Or are we back to where we started, with nothing but a wrecked coast and a few thousand displaced lives to show for it?