For what little it’s worth, I’m gonna say a few things about New Orleans. I’m not an expert on the place. I’ve never been there. Until this week, I didn’t know that it was below sea level. I didn\u2019t know that it was jammed in between the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain. I didn’t know that it was such a poor, African-American city (about 1 in 4 below the poverty income level). I didn’t know that about 1 in 5 didn’t have access to a vehicle. I didn’t know that it was so vulnerable to a hurricane. But the federal government did. So it’s kind of shocking to know that they didn’t have a plan to deal with what happened there this past week. A lot of people are blaming President Bush, and he certainly deserves some blame. But what about Presidents Clinton, Daddy Bush, Reagan, Carter, etc.? Why weren’t detailed evacuation and shelter plans made up back in their time against mass-flooding and societal breakdown in New Orleans? <\/p>\n
New Orleans has experienced a massive infrastructure collapse, one that has vanquished civilized society. “The thin veneer of civilization has been scraped off”, as one British newspaper said. It all reminds me of those cheesy made-for-TV movies that you saw in late 1999 about the Y2K computer thing. Remember Y2K? Some people predicted that everything would shut down when the calendar rolled over to 1\/1\/00. Power, water supply, fuel, food supply, banks and medicine would disappear, and there would be riots, killings, looting, and general chaos. Well, in 2000 the USA was spared all of that, but 5 year later the poor people of New Orleans are experiencing it. What happened to the federal and local emergency plans that were supposedly ready had Y2K gone the other way? Or what about those pre-nuclear war evacuation plans for urban dwellers? How were they going to get people on buses and resettle them in small towns?<\/p>\n
Some black politicians have said that the feds didn’t rush in when the levees started to fail on Monday night because of old fashioned racism and classism. According to these politicians, the fact that most of the victims are poor and black explains the federal government’s “wait and see” response. At first I passed those comments off as the usual exaggeration that every political leader engages in while trying to gain something for his or her voting clients. But now I wonder if maybe they’re correct. <\/p>\n
(However, Mayor Nagin’s candor has been refreshing. While reaming out the feds, he also said that a lot of the criminal behavior is what you would expect when neighborhood junkies can’t get their fixes.)<\/p>\n
This is America’s first good look at urban poverty since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And it ain’t pretty. Some people, like Louisiana Governor Blanco, are implying that the poor brought it on themselves; they should have left when the hurricane warnings were issued last Saturday. Yea, well — when you’re poor, you often don’t have a car and you don’t have money to stay in a motel somewhere. If you leave for a shelter, whatever you leave behind in your home can get looted. Poor people usually don’t have insurance and don’t have savings to replace their appliances and furniture. Also, as the Superdome fiasco showed, you may not be treated very humanely if you do go to a shelter. As always, the rain certainly did fall hardest upon the poor. And it continues to fall.<\/p>\n
New Orleans will be back. It’s too big a tourist franchise to be abandoned. There’s still money to be made. But the question is, when it gets rebuilt, what role will the poor be allowed to play in the “New New Orleans”? The hotels and hospitals and restaurants and shipping ports will still need low-wage workers once they get going again. But will the re-designers of New Orleans let them live there? And what about the non-working poor, i.e. the welfare mothers (technically, parents on “temporary assistance”), and the people (mostly guys) getting by on General Assistance, SSI, Veterans benefits, intermittent jobs, and some crime on the side (e.g., small drug sales or house break-ins)? They often live in public housing and in run-down private apartments being rented out dirt cheap so as to make a few more bucks before they burn down or collapse. <\/p>\n
Will New Orleans have any more such housing? As House Speaker Dennis Hassert asked (without directly asking it), should<\/u> New Orleans have such housing and such people? I.e., maybe the poorest of the poor should be kept in more stable circumstances. But who IS going to take them if New Orleans won’t take them back? Are they just going to drift about like hobos in the 1930s, or form tent cities on the outskirts? New Orleans is about to become an incredible social experiment, not unlike the South during the years following the Civil War. Let’s hope that we somehow do a bit better with reconstruction this time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For what little it’s worth, I’m gonna say a few things about New Orleans. I’m not an expert on the place. I’ve never been there. Until this week, I didn’t know that it was below sea level. I didn\u2019t know that it was jammed in between the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain. I didn’t know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}