Posted on 11/26/2005 4:40:58 PM PST by Ellesu
Get a job. Find a place to live. Pull yourself up.
These are the things some people are saying about evacuees from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, about 12,000 of whom remain in taxpayer-funded hotel rooms in Georgia.
In the weeks after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, people across the country opened their wallets, homes and hearts to the victims. But three months after thousands of evacuees arrived in Georgia, some attitudes have shifted from compassion to something very different.
For Anna Corley, a 39-year-old communications worker from East Point, the change in attitude occurred while she was watching a television interview with a female evacuee. The woman was living in a Georgia hotel, in a room paid for by taxpayers, and complaining she wasn't getting enough help.
With that, Corley — who had donated clothes and money, and dropped off spaghetti and tomato sauce at a supermarket bin — changed her mind.
"Come on, people," Corley said. "Three months and they can't find a place to live? Oh, wait, they want to see how long Uncle Sugar will pay for it. How long did they think the gravy train ran? Have some self-respect and pride."
Corley is among a group of people disappointed, if not disgusted, with the thousands of evacuees still living in hotels — a program that has cost federal taxpayers $300 million. Some of these critics initially supported the evacuees, but now believe many hurricane victims are taking advantage of the generosity.
Corley's anger is driven in part by her own experiences. She said she was homeless 20 years ago, living in a Buick, after losing her job and a place to stay.
"I think we need to give them a hand up, not a hand out," Corley said.
Veronica Jones, a 25-year-old corrections officer from Lawrenceville, feels the same way. After volunteering at a Red Cross shelter — helping evacuees apply for assistance, talking them through the loss and dislocation — her sympathy has run dry.
"They drink and smoke marijuana all night. Don't work or go to school," Jones said. She said she formed her opinion by observing some evacuees living in her area.
Evacuees, for their part, say they've heard the harsh remarks. Sometimes to their face.
"It just adds to the hurt. It doesn't help," said Mike Washington, who lost his home and print shop in the New Orleans flood.
It is unclear how much public sentiment has shifted regarding the evacuees. Several metro Atlanta charities say they still see strong support for the hurricane victims.
"We're not seeing that kind of backlash," said Edward Powers, executive director of Travelers Aid of Metro Atlanta.
Emotional fatigue
This is a critical time for the hotel-dwelling evacuees. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has given them until Jan. 7 to get out. After that, FEMA will no longer pay the hotel bills.
The deadline has sent many evacuees scrambling to find housing, but several nonprofit groups helping them say it will be difficult to move thousands of evacuees into new housing in a matter of weeks. They fear some will end up on the street.
State Senate leader Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) said FEMA's deadline provides the prodding needed to spur the evacuees into action. "At some point, the government can't be everybody's mama," he said earlier this month.
Such thinking has been bolstered by public criticism of the hotel evacuees by radio talk show hosts. Local talker Neal Boortz called them "parasites with rights."
Suzanne Phillips, a New York City psychologist who specializes in trauma, grief and loss, offered another explanation for the waning sympathy among some people. She said people feel uncomfortable that the tragedy has continued this long.
"It makes them anxious that the problem doesn't go away," she said.
As time goes on, Phillips said, people become emotionally fatigued dealing with the despair and devastation of the hurricanes. Much of the disgust over the evacuees has been directed at those still in hotels. Phillips worries those opinions will taint people's perceptions about the many other evacuees who are living in apartments and homes.
In addition, the aftermath of Katrina has brought to light the issue of poverty in New Orleans. But rather than explore the complex causes of poverty, people often politicize the issue and dismiss the victims as unworthy of their sympathy, she said.
"If you dismiss it, you don't have to deal with it," Phillips said. "People start blaming the victim for not wrapping it up and getting on with it."
Forget the discount
Stories about evacuees cashing in their assistance money on expensive purses and big televisions make it easier to write them off, said Rick Cohen, executive director of the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy.
Washington, the New Orleans evacuee who lost his home and printing shop, is living in an apartment in Smyrna with his wife and 5-year-old son, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. They don't even have a table for his son to do homework.
He said he has been offered a job at $10 an hour for 30 hours a week. But he said his time was better spent working with insurance companies, applying for loans and searching out a new location for his business in metro Atlanta.
Recently he asked a department store cashier if the store was offering a discount for evacuees. She responded, "You all want everything."
Janice Ramsey is still looking for a job, having been on 10 job interviews. A former advertising worker for a Biloxi casino, she thinks interviewers worry she will hold the job only until she can return home. But she says she plans to stay in Georgia.
She's been living with her four children in a Days Inn in Stone Mountain, in a FEMA-funded room. The criticism of evacuees, she believes, is getting worse.
"It makes it seem like I'm a freeloader," she said.
Ramsey had just gotten off Section 8 public assistance when Katrina hit. Her father drowned, and she has been back and forth to home identifying and burying his body.
Most of the $6,000 she received in storm assistance is gone, she said, but she has found a rental home.
"I don't want nobody to have sympathy for me. All I need is a boost," she said. "I want to be independent, like I was before."
Just wait for these hotel owners to send the government a bill for all the damages done to their rooms.
I wonder how many times she had to go back to NO to do this. I mean, really . . . ???
You sound like that editorial out of Lousiana that argued the rest of the country owned it to New Orleans to rebuild it because it was such a marvelous city. My answer is, no one "owes" anything to those who can but don't want to work. They are entitled to beg others for handouts to sustain themselves but I don't see that they are "owed" anything, by New Orleans, Louisiana, or anyplace else.
By the way, if you are implying that New Orleans was carrying beyond its fair share of human driftwood, I doubt it. If they were there, it was because the policies of the city were encouraging or sustaining it. You get what YOU deserve. If NO had a system of requiring quid pro quo or some other kinds of behavior that showed progress towards independence, then hard-core driftwood drifts on along with the current to other places. Maybe that is why was NO called "The Big Easy".
I like that.
I got out of Buffalo in 1982 when it was exactly the way you describe it 23 years later. I went to Atlanta, had 20 interviews in a week, got a job, an apartment and a flight home, loaded up the truck and was at work within 6 days. Lived in Atlanta 17 years and then moved here to Toronto.
I'm sorry to hear Buffalo is still just the way I left it in 1982.
For many of the people all the flood did was float their junk from one end of the room to the other. Many of them were sponging off the taxpayers before the flood and they do not know, or rather do not want to know, anything else. And if there is a form to fill out to get an extension to benefits becuase of "trauma" they will quickly learn with the help of poverty pimp social workers how to fill them out.
Can't his wife help too? Why can't she handle the paperwork and scout places for the print shop while he would be working the 30 hours and their son is in school?
No, it has gotten worse since 82
I got here in 91 and it has gotten worse.
They just raised the sales tax to 8.75
County Property taxes going up 14%
Plus all local property taxes going up.
http://www.RusThompson.com
This is my blog on Erie county and the state politics
How did that saying go? "God helps those that help themselves...?"
Is that a quote from the Looter Guy?
I don't know if you are being facetious, but the rest of the country is not going to bear the burden of the welfare state that is Louisiana. The rest of the country has had welfare reform, we don't let people live on welfare for indefinite periods of time, that are capable of working.
How would you like to be one of these hotel owners? I predict that these Katrina slackers will be given a deadline to become independent and if they don't make it, they will be shipped back to Louisiana.
This article paints with a pretty broad brush. Thousands of people were affected, and some for the rest of their lives. It will take years to recover from this disaster. My heart goes out to the victims. To focus on the minority of free-loaders diminishes the magnitude of this tragedy.
"I'm an evacuee. I ain't no refugee. That job offer is an insult!"
Beats working at that $10 an hour job, I guess. Almost three months after the fact, still asking for special treatment and looking for loans instead of working.
And we are supposed to feel bad because he hasn't bothered to get his son a ten dollar table at Salvation Army to do his homework on.
It hasn't been a matter of weeks, it's been a matter of months. It's only urgent now that there is a deadline.
-PJ
If he's getting royalties, he's doing all right.
After the media circus and the craven congressional hustle to shovel billions at the problem, I agree you could see this coming a mile away. We will still be paying for some of these people's bills a year from now, and they will only be angrier and more demanding.
>>>I was adversly affected when I ran out of Vanilla extract on Thursday<<<
HAHAHA! I know I shouldn't laugh at such bonechilling downtrodden adversity, but I hope your pumpkin pies were already made.
;)
No offense to Buffalo ... however, if I'm native to NOLA Buffalo, NY isn't exactly going to be my first choice for relocation ... neither is Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, etc..
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