NOTES FROM NEW ORLEANS: A Hard Head Makes A Soft Behind...sm

NOTES FROM NEW ORLEANS: A Hard Head Makes A Soft Behind

By Deborah Cotton

By now, you’ve heard the election results – Mayor Nagin against Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu in the run-off, the mayor coming away with the a large number of the Black vote, including those of my Black friends who swore they were done with him.  As one brother later told me, “At the end of the day, I had to go with my own.” 

     Forcing the issue of having a Black mayor for New Orleans, even when all his actions demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to make issues important to the Black community a priority, in the hopes that it will help us reclaim our ‘Chocolate City’, strikes me as, well…hard-headed. 

     I went to the Sheraton Election Night to cover Nagin’s speech.  The room was filled with nothing but Black faces, so shocking considering just two months ago, you couldn’t hardly find a Black person with a New Orleans driver’s license who had anything nice to say about our Mayor’s on-the-job performance.  I looked into those faces, faces of friends and people I’d met out at rallies and neighborhood planning meetings, all of whom openly discussed their dissatisfaction with the current leadership.  But this mayor’s race was no longer about the future of New Orleans.  This race has become about race. 

     At Nagin’s Election Night party, there was a distinct feeling of Black people welcoming the prodigal son back home, of redemption of the husband who strayed.  Once it was clear his White majority supporters were backing anyone but him, he started out on the ‘Back To Africa’ tour so many of our prodigal sons and daughters have performed in – OJ Simpson, Mariah, Vanessa…and was successful in securing a large number of Black votes.  There were literally tears in the eyes of many of the women there, cracked voices calling out “We love you!”  “Speak your truth!”  They loved that he said “Chocolate City” and pissed White people off. 

     The room was electric and his speech had some profound moments.  But then… the classic Nagin kicked in and he said something that fell like a bad note in his otherwise melodic song.   

     “This economic pie is getting ready to explode.  And it will be shared equally.  I want the community to get more comfortable with the Ray Nagin type. The Joe Canizaro type...”

     Smiles and tears froze.

     Joe Canizaro is a local land developer and one of President Bush’s biggest campaign contributors.  When Nagin tapped his choices for the ‘Bring Back New Orleans’ advisory panel that would create a rebuilding plan for New Orleans, he followed Canizaro’s advice and stepped over local talent and intelligentsia and hired consultants from Los Angeles called the ‘Urban Planning Institute’, of which Canizaro was a long time board member.  Many New Orleanians were upset they had so little representation on the BNOB panel.  And the ones that were included on the panel, like City Council President Oliver Thomas, voiced frustration at being dis-included from many a luncheon and social gathering were decisions and deals were made about the rebuilding plan.  When the plan was finally unveiled, it was clear to those watching why the planning lunches were secret.

     When the BNOB committee presented it plan to the public at the Marriot Hotel last November, we saw a map of New Orleans on the overhead screen that had large green swatches over areas that the ULI recommended for permanent closure -the Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, and Gentilly.  These areas are predominately Black communities.  Even more telling about the agenda of the planners was the fact that the plan made no mention of where else in New Orleans the residents of these closed Black neighborhoods could move to. 

     A plan for a new New Orleans.  “Oh, we don’t know where ‘those’ people went…” Residents were absolutely livid.  So much so that the ULI returned to the community months later with a revised plan that said the neighborhoods proposed for phasing out would be given four months to prove they could repopulate and be viable or the city would begin a forced buy-out program.  There still seemed to be a lack of understanding on the part of the from-out-of-town panel that people have not been able to repopulate their neighborhoods because their houses are destroyed, the insurance companies are denying claims across the board, landlords are price gouging the rental market, and FEMA’s STILL not provided even half the trailers requested. 

     Just as the BNOB panel began to take public comments after their presentation of the revised plan, a huge Black man bellowed out like a sonic boom from the back of the room:

“You’re not taking my land!!  If you come trying to take my property, you’re gonna have a baby Iraq on your hands!  Nobody worked the jobs I’ve worked, taking crap from employers I didn’t wanna take, to make my note every month to sit here and have you tell me I can’t rebuild MY own home!!  That’s my house and if you thinking ‘bout coming to take my land, you betta come heavy.  And Joe Canizaro – I HATE YOU!”

     Mr. Harvey’s explosion was a pivotal moment in this early phase of our reconstruction.  His face made the front page of the paper and he’s since been interviewed by dozens of media outlets.  His roaring outburst exposed the stifled anger, disgust, rage, pain, and grief so many homeowners felt at the slap in the face by these Los Angeles-based, Nagin-Canizaro sponsored planners. 

     Blacks here have an over-arching mistrust of Canizaro.  And the moment Nagin uttered his name on Election Night as someone we need to be checking for, we witnessed the first signs of the prodigal son returning to his old ways. 

     I looked at the Black faces around me, their responses to his Canizaro remark, and saw frozen smiles – and determination.  Determination to go forward, against all the signs and track record of what they knew they didn’t want, for fear of losing our Black foothold in local government. 

     “Don’t we even get to keep that?”, we ask ourselves here in the New Orleans.  ‘We lost our homes, every last stick of furniture, every appliance, photo albums and grandmother’s jewelry and all our files and the dog too and family, friends, neighbors we grew up with – everything that give context and meaning for even being here in this life…’  The only thing many Black people got out of here with before the levees broke, besides our memories, was their Black skin.  And a feeling is alive here that if we lose our Black leadership, the only thing that survived in New Orleans, we won’t have a future here. 

     When I first moved to New Orleans, I was saturated in blackness and I loved it.  Black people were everywhere and it really felt like another country, other than the United States.  One of my favorite jaunts then, and still today, is to go to City Hall and revel in the family vibe where ‘my folks’ are running things.  No other public office have I ever felt so comfortable, so…relevant.  And so included.   

     I, too, am still constantly wrestling with strong emotions about being a Black public figure, a Black woman, tearing away from the fold, away from ‘the Black man’.  I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about Mayor Nagin’s ability to lead us out of darkness.  But…you know - especially you ladies - how you know something deep inside that you don’t want to be true, so you say to yourself, ‘Maybe I’m wrong…’  But later on, when the sh-t hits the fan, you realize how foolish it was to doubt what your wisdom and intuition told you. 

     New Orleans can’t afford false pride based on race.  Our empire has been completely demolished.  Sometimes, there’s so much to do, so much wrong here that needs addressing, and you get so overwhelmed trying to hold it together, you just sit back down and start crying.  Crying for the old days.

     And that’s when faith comes in.  Faith that if we walk on what we know is His truth, that He’ll provide the best outcome.  And if we force things to be our way, moving from a limited, human mentality of fear, we’ll just end up with more of this hard knocks life. 

     My grandmother used to tell me whenever I was cutting up, “A hard head makes a soft behind!”  Her words came rushing to me when Mayor Nagin finished his speech and the DJ fired up the room with a song from the Gap Band:

‘Oops! Upside Your Head’

Sounds like foreshadowing to me…

     Deborah Cotton is a freelance journalist and public speaker based in New Orleans, covering on-the-ground stories of the city’s recovery and chronicling the rebuilding efforts of the historic Ninth Ward.  She can be reached at Deborah.cotton@gmail.com.

* From now until May 7th, check out her election/Jazz Fest coverage in her daily blog ‘The Second Line’ on http://blackvoices.aol.com

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Hi folks, sarah and I are both hiding underground now.  Please vote for us and we will pop up like groundhogs for the inauguration.

see gretawire.com

Lots of news that there just isn't enough help and the whole city is breaking down.  Bush has turned down planes and able-bodied assistance from Canada and Russia as well as offers from many other countries.  Says we can handle it ourselves.  Folks in New Orleans say FEMA is there but totally unorganized and not providing enough help.  I'm thinking this is in the U.S. and it's a MESS.  What kind of message are we sending to the world? 

I'm getting pretty darn uptight about this whole situation. 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Fast-rising water brought by the outer edge of Hurricane Rita spilled over a freshly patched levee in New Orleans on Friday and flooded a deserted neighborhood of the already devastated city.

Water from the industrial canal, where the levee breached during Hurricane Katrina more than three weeks ago, was submerging houses in the particularly hard-hit Ninth Ward section on the city's east side.

Water also poured out from under the canal's western barrier, which faces the historic French Quarter roughly three miles away.

An official with the New Orleans Fire Department said flooding reached a mile inland west of the canal. It also reached as far north as Interstate 10, which divides the city.

The area had been nearly dried out in recent days.

Residents have not been permitted to return since Katrina hit the ward, where nearly all the small, one-story houses appeared damaged beyond repair.

Searches by rescue teams, who have been going door to door seeking storm victims, were suspended.

Water had begun to seep under the weakened levee late on Thursday, but officials said they did not expect flooding on such a scale so soon.

It's frustrating, but there ain't nothing you can do about Mother Nature, said Henry Rodriguez, president of nearby St. Bernard Parish, also heavily hit by Katrina on August 29.

He said he had driven through the area and saw floodwaters reaching 10 blocks from the levee.

We were hoping this wouldn't happen, but with Rita knocking at our door, we're stuck with this, said Mark Heimann, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He said he was not aware of any levee breaches elsewhere in the city, emptied of most of its 450,000 residents by Katrina.



© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Rescuers Race to Save Katrina Victims

Tuesday, August 30, 2005 NEW ORLEANS — Rescuers along the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast pushed aside the dead to reach the living Tuesday in a race against time and rising waters, while New Orleans sank deeper into crisis and Louisiana's governor ordered storm refugees out of this drowning city. As looters stripped stores of items, sometimes in front of police, violence broke out in the Big Easy. At around 11 p.m. EDT, two gunmen with AK-47s fired shots into a police station. No one was hurt, and the men fled into the city's French quarter section. Meanwhile, two levees broke and sent water coursing into the streets of New Orleans a full day after the city appeared to have escaped widespread destruction from Hurricane Katrina. An estimated 80 percent of the below-sea-level city was under water, up to 20 feet deep in places, with miles and miles of homes swamped. The situation is untenable, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. It's just heartbreaking. One Mississippi county alone said its death toll was at least 100, and officials are very, very worried that this is going to go a lot higher, said Joe Spraggins, civil defense director for Harrison County, home to Biloxi and Gulfport. Several victims in the county were from a beachfront apartment building that collapsed under a 25-foot wall of water as Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds. And Louisiana officials said many were feared dead there, too, making Katrina one of the most punishing storms to hit the United States in decades. After touring the destruction by air, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said it is not of case of homes being severely damaged, they're simply not there. ... I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said hundreds, if not thousands, of people may still be stuck on roofs and in attics, and so rescue boats were bypassing the dead. We're not even dealing with dead bodies, Nagin said. They're just pushing them on the side. The flooding in New Orleans grew worse by the minute, prompting the evacuation of hotels and hospitals and an audacious plan to drop huge sandbags from helicopters to close up one of the breached levees. At the same time, looting broke out in some neighborhoods, the sweltering city of 480,000 had no drinkable water, and the electricity could be out for weeks. With water rising perilously inside the Superdome, Blanco said the tens of thousands of refugees now huddled there and other shelters in New Orleans would have to be evacuated. She asked residents to spend Wednesday in prayer. That would be the best thing to calm our spirits and thank our Lord that we are survivors, she said. Slowly, gradually, we will recover; we will survive; we will rebuild. A helicopter view of the devastation over the New Orleans area revealed people standing on black rooftops baking in the sunshine while waiting for rescue boats. A row of desperately needed ambulances were lined up on the interstate, water blocking their path. Roller coasters jutted out from the water at a Six Flags amusement park. Hundreds of inmates were seen standing on a highway because the prison had been flooded. Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record) quietly traced the sign of the cross across her head and chest as she looked out at St. Bernard Parish, where only roofs peaked out from the water. The whole parish is gone, Landrieu said. All day long, rescuers in boats and helicopters pulled out shellshocked and bedraggled flood refugees from rooftops and attics. Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu said that 3,000 people have been rescued by boat and air, some placed shivering and wet into helicopter baskets. They were brought by the truckload into shelters, some in wheelchairs and some carrying babies, with stories of survival and of those who didn't make it. Oh my God, it was hell, said Kioka Williams, who had to hack through the ceiling of the beauty shop where she worked as floodwaters rose in New Orleans' low-lying Ninth Ward. We were screaming, hollering, flashing lights. It was complete chaos. Frank Mills was in a boarding house in the same neighborhood when water started swirling up toward the ceiling and he fled to the roof. Two elderly residents never made it out, and a third was washed away trying to climb onto the roof. He was kind of on the edge of the roof, catching his breath, Mills said. Next thing I knew, he came floating past me. Across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, more than 1 million residents remained without electricity, some without clean drinking water. An untold number who heeded evacuation orders were displaced and 40,000 were in Red Cross shelters, with officials saying it could be weeks, if not months, before most will be able to return. Emergency medical teams from across the country were sent into the region and President Bush cut short his Texas vacation Tuesday to return to Washington to focus on the storm damage. Federal Emergency Management Agency director Mike Brown warned that structural damage to homes, diseases from animal carcasses and chemicals in floodwaters made it unsafe for residents to come home anytime soon. And a mass return also was discouraged to keep from interfering with rescue and recovery efforts. That was made tough enough by the vast expanse of floodwaters in coastal areas that took an eight-hour pounding from Katrina's howling winds and up to 15 inches of rainfall. From the air, neighborhood after neighborhood looked like nothing but islands of rooftops surrounded by swirling, tea-colored water. In New Orleans, the flooding actually got worse Tuesday. Failed pumps and levees apparently spilled water from Lake Pontchartrain into streets. The rising water forced hotels to evacuate, led a hospital to boatlift patients to emergency shelters, and drove the staff of New Orleans' Times-Picayune newspaper out of its offices. Officials planned to use helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags and dozens of giant concrete barriers into the breach, and expressed confidence the problem could be solved. But if the water rose a couple feet higher, it could wipe out water system for whole city, said New Orleans' homeland security chief Terry Ebbert. A clearer picture of the destruction in Alabama became to emerge Tuesday: cement slabs where homes once stood, a 100-foot shrimp boat smoldering on its side, people searching for swept-away keepsakes. The damage in some areas appears to be worse than last year's Hurricane Ivan. In devastated Biloxi, Miss., areas that were not underwater were littered with tree trunks, downed power lines and chunks of broken concrete. Some buildings were flattened. The string of floating barge casinos crucial to the coastal economy were a shambles. At least three of them were picked up by the storm surge and carried inland, their barnacle-covered hulls sitting up to 200 yards inland. One of the deadliest spots appeared to be Biloxi's Quiet Water Beach apartments, where authorities estimated 30 people were washed away, although the exact toll was unknown. All that was left of the red-brick building was a concrete slab. We grabbed a lady and pulled her out the window and then we swam with the current, 55-year-old Joy Schovest said through tears. It was terrifying. You should have seen the cars floating around us. We had to push them away when we were trying to swim. Said Biloxi Mayor A. J. Holloway: This is our tsunami. Looting became a problem in both Biloxi and in New Orleans, in some cases in full view of police and National Guardsmen. One police officer was shot in the head by a looter in New Orleans, but was expected to recover, Sgt. Paul Accardo, a police spokesman. On New Orleans' Canal Street, which actually resembled a canal, dozens of looters ripped open the steel gates on clothing and jewelry stores, some packing plastic garbage cans with loot to float down the street. One man, who had about 10 pairs of jeans draped over his left arm, was asked if he was salvaging things from his store. No, the man shouted, that's EVERYBODY'S store! Looters at a Wal-Mart brazenly loaded up shopping carts with items including micorwaves, coolers and knife sets. Others walked out of a sporting goods store on Canal Street with armfuls of shoes and football jerseys. Outside the broken shells of Biloxi's casinos, people picked through slot machines to see if they still contained coins and ransacked other businesses. People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they're Santa Claus, said Marty Desei, owner of a Super 8 motel. Insurance experts estimated the storm will result in up to $25 billion in insured losses. That means Katrina could prove more costly than record-setting Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which caused an inflation-adjusted $21 billion in losses. Oil prices jumped by more than $3 a barrel on Tuesday, climbing above $70 a barrel, amid uncertainty about the extent of the damage to the Gulf region's refineries and drilling platforms. By midday Tuesday, Katrina was downgraded to a tropical depression, with winds around 35 mph. It was moving northeast through Tennessee at around 21 mph, with the potential to dump 8 inches of rain and spin off deadly tornadoes. Katrina left 11 people dead in its soggy jog across South Florida last week, as a much weaker storm.

Wouldn't it be nice if precautions could be taken to build this city correctly to prevent another tragedy?  Nah.... Bush won't go for that.  Killing people in Iraq is more important.

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans began the gruesome task of collecting its thousands of dead on Sunday as the Bush administration tried to save face after its botched rescue plans left the city at the mercy of Hurricane Katrina.

Except for rescue workers and scattered groups of people, streets in the once-vibrant capital of jazz and good times were all but abandoned after a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring Texas and other states.

Battered and sickened survivors made no attempt to disguise their anger: We have been abandoned by our own country, Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC's Meet the Press.

It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans, Broussard said. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.

After a nightmare confluence of natural disaster and political ineptitude that al Qaeda-linked Web sites called evidence of the wrath of God striking America, National Guard troops and U.S. marshals patrolled the city, stricken in the days after the hurricane by anarchic violence and looting.

Local and federal officials said they expected to find thousands of corpses still floating in flood waters or locked inside homes and buildings destroyed by the devastating storm that struck the U.S. Gulf coast last Monday.

When we remove the water from New Orleans, we're going to uncover people who died hiding in houses, who got caught by the flood. People whose remains will be found in the street, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Fox News.

AS UGLY AS YOU CAN IMAGINE

There'll be pollution. It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine.

Later, Chertoff flew into New Orleans and said the search for storm victims would be arduous. Let me be clear: we're going to have to go house to house in this city, he said. This is not going to happen overnight.

President George W. Bush, who in a rare admission of error, conceded on Friday that the results of his administration's relief efforts were unacceptable, said on Saturday he would send 7,200 more active-duty troops over three days.    Continued ...



© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

See link for entire article.

Bush: New Orleans may need a decade

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 28 (UPI) -- As he headed for the Gulf Coast on Monday, U.S. President George Bush told an interviewer he expects the rebuilding of New Orleans to take a decade.

Bush planned to spend the anniversary of the U.S. Gulf Coast landfall of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans after a visit to Biloxi, Miss. It was his 13th visit to the devastated area.

We can rebuild buildings, the question is can we rebuild its soul, he told April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks. We can. I believe, 10 years from now April, you and I will be thinking about our time here, and trying to remember what it was like 10 years ago

Bush came under fire last year for apparently ignoring Katrina immediately after New Orleans flooded and then flying over the city in Air Force One.

Later White House spokeswoman Dana Perrino said she wasn't aware of a specific time period but that the president has said all along that it would take more than a year to rebuild New Orleans.

In terms of like, 10 years, I don't know about exact time frame, but it's certainly going to take several years, Perrino said.

She is such a media "prostitute".  Why no one can see through her transparent self-promotion antics is beyond me, but if the pubs are looking to her for leadership, boy are they in major trouble!  

from http://www.infowars.net/articles/may2006/100506clinton.htm

The Clintons and the Bushes have been known to vacation together in more recent times. Earlier this year on CBS, Clinton revealed that he looks upon the Bushes as a surrogate family, and how Barbara Bush refers to him as her son. Is this really a picture of two distinct and opposed political ideologies pitted against one another?

on the internet you can find "facts" to back up just about any ridiculous claim from two-headed monsters, to ape babies to all sorts of conspiracy theories.  There's even a cult that worship their own stool (yes I am not making this up) and I'm sure this cult has multiple references and "facts" to back up their beliefs in preserving their feces forever. 

But all that doesn't make it true.  And the discriminating and intelligent person should be able to tell feces from fact, but apparently you can't.

Question is who is behind him and who put him where he is.  This is an old article but the issues are still current.  And this is from..The Pakistan Daily (not America)

http://www.daily.pk/world/84-worldnews/6726-barack-obama-is-not-a-us-citizen.html

I think some (definitely not all or a majority) of Americans just don't want to face the fact that the enemy we face is not from within.  Again, I'm not saying our government is perfect or without elements of corruption, but what I am saying is that we are comfortable in our *Lexus boxes* and mocha latte lifestyles.  Many people, especially the generation now in their early to mid twenties, have absolutely no idea about the extreme sacrifice of our ancestors made to make this country what it is.  I believe our country is at a tipping point.  I think people prefer oblivion and denial and just hoping that we can all just get along.  We really delude ourselves about all the violence and crime going on in our cities as being from people who are victims of this and that.  They think more understanding will rehabilitate people who yes, may have a had a hard life, but that should not excuse them of criminal behavior.

People just don't want to believe evil is a real thing.  It's not just the result of misunderstanding or a challenging childhood it's an actual force in the universe.  I'm trying not to get religious here, but if you don't have a good grasp on the actual existence of good and evil and the origin of them there's no way you're going to ever believe that what is happening in the world is bigger than all of us.

9/11 and Iraq - not related.  And that comes from our own government's report.

Head in sand?  Your belief appears to be that by invading one country in an entire region of Islamic culture that we can make the bad guys go away.  This isn't the American West in the 1860s.  We can't wipe out all the Injuns and take over their land.  The Middle Eastern culture does not like the U.S. politics, does not like our culture and generally doesn't want to embrace our form of government or religion so this experiment in killing all the bad guys in Iraq to secure the rest of the world from the terrorists was ridiculous from the start. 

Then...if you keep your head in the sand long enough you can keep repeating over and over that the war is well-conceived and well-carried out and is going well...er, at least will start going well ANY MINUTE. 

Maybe love won't cure terrorism against the U.S. but killing our soldiers in Iraq as well as a million Iraqi civilians isn't going to either.

Why does it make you feel better to keep telling yourself everyone on this board is pretty much all the same person?  Email me as well as the other folks on the board who you also think are me.  The truth will emerge if you care to discover it.