One Perspective on perspectives: New Orleans

A friend here in New Orleans has been working some tough social work cases in the past two weeks. He's very young, but he has already taken on the responsibility for finding jobs and homes for many New Orleans residents.

I talked to a man who lost everything he had in the flood, and had come back here to try and start over. His family is still displaced in different states. He told me "they" blew up the levees so the Lower Ninth would flood. There is historical evidence for this theory for they blew up the levees back in the twenties so as to save the French Quarter from a flood. In 1965 Hurricane Betsy provided another opportunity for those in power to decide who lives and who dies when they blew the levees once again.

I was in the Lower Ninth for a day last week. I got to see the rebuilt flood walls atop the levees. So as not to confuse the two, levees are mounds of earth, flood walls are concrete structures built on top of the levees. Anyway I was at Ground Zero, and the remains of the Lower Ninth were still in disarray, desite the official rhetoric of rebuilding and all the good work that independent groups like Common Ground have done so far.

One person from CG told me he came from Houston to help people in the flood, but was turned back at the state line. He tried crossing into Louisiana again, this time with white men (first time was with men of color) and he got through. He found himself feeding people who refused to leave their homes. As this was after the flood, he would get food to people holed up in their attics. One elder woman whom he had gotten food to regularly was found raped and killed in her attic.

The stories are surreal and horrible, and I know that I know only a fraction of a percent of the whole story.

It's funny, but my daily existential experience has been anything but horrible. One doesn't have to pay attention to any of the horrible stories generated by the flood and by extreme poverty.

What I want to say is that society has made it easy for mainstream society to forget/ignore the savagery imposed on the most vulnerable in our midst. I guess it's necessary for that amnesia, that whitewashing of memory and experience to occur if society is to not question itself, and to allow it to happen again, and when it does, to be totally floored that anything like that could happen in this society.

Forget the talk about 'Katrina fatigue'. The margainalized people here are tired of being forgotten.

I will keep my ears and my eyes open.