Beating the horse

Yesterday, in the post which went berserk, I allowed as perhaps the problem was that the photographers/press agencies were different and that might account for the difference in the captions.

killslowly pointed me to this post at blackfolk, where Agence France Press, which did the first photo; of the white folks, had another photo, with a black woman.

The black woman was described as a looter.

On te flip side, it gladdens my heart to know Making Light, Steve Gilliard, Pandagon, Atrios, and a host of others all saw this (at about the same time) and it pissed them off.

Slivers of hope.

Moving out

Maia and I are going on a Charity Ride in the hills above Berkeley. So I'll be, semi-blissfully, out of the loop until Monday.

Her mother's cell has roaming, and I am giving that number to the NCO who would be co-ordinating aid to Kartrina victims (which is, sadly, more than just those folks in New Orleans. The whole Gulf Coast took a beating), so there is the possibility I won't be around for a good long while.

If I get the call, and I get the time, I'll let people know I'm on my way. if you don't hear from me soon, well you know where I am.

In the meanwhile, though I know you've heard it elsewhere, if you've got money to spare, send some to a relief agency. The Red Cross (try a local office, New York is also a good one) Noah's Wish (pets need help too) or whatever charity you favor.

The entire city is evacuated. It will be weeks, if not months, before they can go back.

The City of New Orleans had a population of 485,000 people. They have no jobs, no homes, no way to support themselves. Those who are in hotels right now, won't be able to stay in them. They are going to need help, and not just for the week, but probably for months.

Sports stadiums are not going to be enough.

Winter is coming.

Simmering thoughts

We're on "Wolff time" which means we won't be out until morning (we were supposed to be leaving not later than 1400 this afternoon).

Which let me stroll about the net.

I remember the Loma Prieta Quake. I know SF pretty well, so it was visceral, but removed.

The Northridge Quake. I joke that I slept through it. I was in Monterey at the time, studying Russian. We had the day off, and I spent the morning (having gotten a phone call at some hideous hour, telling me there had been a quake and everyone she knew I'd care about was OK. I went back to bed) staring at my city in tumbled ruin. It was visceral, but removed.

Hurricane Andrew. Removed.

A slew of minor, and not so minor disasters around the country and they rose to the level of concern. If I had friends in the area, I worried for them, but mostly figured they would be all right (the odds of any one person being in the few hundreds who die in such a thing being known to me, slim; and I know it).

That Tuesday.

It was visceral. Not so removed. The whole world seemed knocked about. I know a lot of people in New York. Some of whom worked, or lived, right near Ground Zero. I also have friends who might have been working in the Pentagon. It touched me directly as soon as I realised what was going on.

But this one. This one is personal. I have to look outside to remind myself the world isn't awash, and that I have no real worries.

Why?

The Net. The Net is why That Tuesday was so close to home. RASFF meant I knew, in a personal, if not personally met, way, a lot of people whom I cared about, who; in one way or another had touched me. People I care about. Since then Blogs have come to replace Usenet. pnh and tnh have Making Light where I did my first blogging, vicariously about being in Kuwait. It kept me in touch (as much as one can be kept in touch) with the outside world. It gave me warm fuzzies when Neil Gaiman said pleasant things about my writing.

Then I got a blog (blame libertango who thought my wartime writing ought to be published). Because of that I know people who lived in New Orleans. intelligentrix who gave me one set of insights, as she ranted and rambled about driving a cab. motel666 whom I didn't take to an Elvis Costello concert (because someone on my f-list wanted to see her get out some, and, as I recall, knew she had no way to get there, and likes Elvis Costello, but I didn't know anything about her). Instead, after we'd talked some, in comments back and forth, as such things go, I offered to take her to dinner when I was up helping libertango convalesce from his broken leg.

In a strange, and wonderful way LJ, and the blogosphere, has tied me to more of the world. It's made me more compassionate, which has made me more radical.

The world is a wonderful place, and I feel so much more connected to so much more of it now.

So, to all of you who make up "Blogistan" thanks.

Pissed off.

Katrina did a huge amount of damage.

In real terms (property damage, economic damage, infrastructural damage, and; probably, loss of life) it makes That Tuesday pale by comparison.

It doesn't have the gut-shot shock value, but it's a bigger catastrophe.

It also shows some of the rot in the way we run things.

The rich, they are all right. The Middle Class, they have real problems, and they may end up poor.

The poor, they're screwed.

They were screwed before Katrina came ashore.

Recall the people who were/are in the Superdome... they had to wait for hours to get in. Why? Ostensibly to be searched for weapons (which I can understand) but there was more to it than that Lew Rockwell reports,

"During coverage by Geraldo Rivera Sunday night, FOX NEWS' video cameras zoomed inside the foyer deck of the Superdome and viewers could see a national guard person going through a powder compact from of a woman's purse that was way too small to hold a liquor bottle or a gun. It was obvious that they were looking for drugs in warrantless searches. They instructed all the refugees far back in the seemingly endless lines to have their prescription-pill bottles out when approaching the security checkpoint and also a photo ID to prove that they belonged with the prescription.

There were THOUSANDS of poor, mostly black citizens of the lower Louisiana area, many of them little children and sickly elderly, being forced to stand for hours while the government violated their civil rights with forced searches that were patently unconstitutional, unjust and unreasonable under the dire circumstances. "Don't want to be searched? That's okay...now turn around, go outside and die!" Big choice."

And he's right. Do you think that would fly if the scene were rich folks from Georgetown heading into the the National's Stadium? Me neither.

And now, the people who are heading for the AstroDome, they won't be allowed in, unless they can prove they were in the Superdome. WTF?

Steve Gilliard's got a long post on The Price of Poverty

Some excerpts:When Andy Sullivan knocks Kos for saying this is worse than 9/11, he's wrong and Kos is right, because I lived through 9/11 without so much as a lost glass of water. This is a lot closer to an attack than any natural disaster we've seen. An entire city has turned into a movie set, and I mean Escape from New York. The people fleeing New Orelans are refugees, soemthing we haven't seen since the Civil War. The Astrodome is a temporary solution, and refugee camps will have to be built. There are sharks and alligators swimming in the streets, nobody will be going home for a long time.

There is still an inability to realize the scale of this. They are talking about trucking in supplies. Why not do what they did in Afghanistan and just drop food and water from C-130's? They need to act like this is a humanitarian crisis, and not just a national disaster.

The decision making here is flawed. While the Louisiana NG sits in Mosul, the mayor has to drag cops from search and rescue to looter patrol. Why? Because armed gangs are playing Baghdad, 2003. One guy shot his AK at a police station.

Why does it matter that the NG is in Iraq? Because the infantry which would be stopping looters is in Iraq. It's one thing to get water and shoes, another to rob anything which came along. Which is what some people are doing.

Of course, as the middle class runs out of class, they will start stealing and going nuts because they are just that desperate.

And the surprise: Atlanta has $5 gas. Hmmm, there's no risk of a riot there, is there.

What bothers me is the pace. When you have starving people in other countries, the AF can drop supplies to the needy. In the US, people have to wait for trucks which may not come for days. People are going to die at this pace.

How poor is NOLA?

Read, then ask yourself if you're suprised at how people are reacting.

...
http://www.realestatejournal.com/cityprofiles/neworleans_la.html
Business

Unemployment rate -- June 2003(for New Orleans): 6.6%

Unemployment rate -- June 2002 (for New Orleans): 6.1%

Unemployment rate -- June 2003 (Louisiana): 7.6%

Unemployment rate -- June 2002 (Louisiana): 7.0%

Civilians employed: 562,100

Civilians unemployed: 32,000

Projected job growth, by state: 4.6%

Projected income growth, by state (projected per-capita income change: 1988 through 2020):
39.8% (for Louisiana)

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2003-10-07/news_scut.html
Once again, the government is telling you what most people know by walking down their street -- people are hurting, financially.

Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the nation's official poverty rate rose from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 percent in 2002. Four out of 10 of those poor people live in the South, the poorest part of the nation. In Louisiana, the poverty rate is a third higher than the United States as a whole. Over the past three years, 17.9 percent -- nearly one in five people -- have been poor in this state. That's basically a tie for highest poverty rate in the nation with Arkansas, where the poverty rate officially stands at 18 percent.

http://bizneworleans.com/70+M56d76a2d7b6.html
The underserved
As the 40-year-old DeSalvo sees it, New Orleans represents a gold mine for her research. For one thing, more than a quarter of the city’s population lives below the poverty line. Low-income patients, she says, are more likely than others to suffer from more than one chronic condition, such as obesity, heart disease or diabetes. In addition, more than two-thirds of the local populace is black, constituting what DeSalvo says is an understudied minority group.

And what are we seeing in reaction to the calamaty the citizens there are facing?

A mix. Lots of people are pitching in to help. Some of them from compassion, and some from compassion and anger. annafddd said I just made a donation to the American Red Cross and I'm posting about it here for purely selfish and vile reasons. I'm pissing mad at people who are whining about stopping foreign aid and who ask belligerently where is the rest of the world now that the USA needs it?

Well, here's my 25 $, fuck it.

Though I think the richest country on Earth should take care of its own and could very well afford to do it if it weren't pissing money out in foreign parts that never asked for aid in the shape of military intervention in the first place, those poor bastards in the Gulf Coast shouldn't suffer for the fact that a) their government doesn't give a damn about them and b) I'm mad at it for this.

I don't blame her. I'm angry too, and a little ashamed, because she's right, we have enough money that we ought to be able to prevent, both the poverty,and the inadequate response we are going to see.

Some people, Jonah Goldberg for example, are just mad. They are frothing that the folks there are suffering, and that other people care. "Several readers complain that it's in fact true that the hurricane will disproportionately affect poor people. I don't really dispute that in the sense most mean it. Yes, the poor will have special hardships. Obviously so. But what I objected to, and still object to, is the reflexive playing of the class card. Is it really true that some middle class retirees who heeded the advice of the government to leave town, only to watch their homes be looted after a lifetime of hardwork for a better life are suffering less than a poor person who lost his rented apartment? What's the metric for measuring this sort of suffering? What about the small businessman who worked his entire life to build something he's proud of? What about the families who lost loved ones, but had the poor taste to make more money than the poverty line?

Whatever happened to the idea that unity in the face of a calamity is an important value? We're all in it together, I guess, except for the poor who are extra-special.

So there you have it, the poor, it's too bad for them, but hey, he's in it with them (the same way his chickenhawk-ass is fighting the good fight for the freedom of Iraq and the destruction of terrorism, safe behind his keyboard).


Jesus said we should always have the poor with us. There are those who see this as absolution, since Jesus said there would always be poor, we don't really have to go all out to help them. They conveniently forget what else he said, to the young man who was obedient to all the commandments, "Then sell all you have and give it to the poor."

I don't think we need to go so far as to make everyone give up all they have (though I don't think that levelling the field some would be a bad idea, if not because it's right and fitting, then because the example of 1798 is horrid, and can be repeated), but we can do a lot to make it better.

I close with this.

Matt: 25 41-46

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.