Guilty.
Posted on 08/28/2007 9:51:44 PM PDT by LdSentinal
Last summer I was the poster girl for New Orleans . My picture ran in the Sunday paper with the headline Generation K. I smiled, flanked by hot pink oleander and golden hibiscus.
In the interview I praised the city for its social warmth and tropical elegance. I declared my goal to tell stories about its stumbling, slow recovery. I'd quit bussing tables at an Uptown bistro so I could report full time.
I've reported for this network and others on crime, housing, insurance and tourism. But unlike most reporters who fly in for a few weeks at a time, I've LIVED here. So, when I go to the drug store, and chat with the drug store clerk ...she recognizes me. Last year on Labor Day she was crying. In the past, she'd have thrown the family picnic. Her house flooded to the roof. Some of her family died; the rest, left. No more family, no more picnics. Then there's the family I met at the mechanic. They were waiting for an oil change. They were part of the crowd at the Superdome after the flood. A bus took them to Arkansas. That's where they live now. They had a cooler of andouille sausage to bring back. No more hot dogs in the gumbo!
I've taken fierce pride in being a local. When I travel I'm a junky for talk about the city. Someone will ask "So, how is it down there?" I launch into a litany. There are busted traffic lights, leaky sewer lines, mountains of debris, the skyrocketing murder rate, miles of desolation, and the levees still aren't fixed. But you should come, I say. It's like a battered beauty queen. Hard to look at, and messed up even more on the inside, but still so regal and charming. This is where the listener I've taken hostage turns away slowly to engage someone less insane.
They don't understand that I'm in love. I talk to friends about New Orleans like a dysfunctional romance. I gush over it one day, then call up bawling and heartbroken the next. Why can't it change? Stop being self-destructive and violent? It has so much potential.
Recently, my blinders started to come off. It was building for awhile. My friend Helen Hill was murdered in her home;other friends have been mugged. We don't go out much any more...
But then there was this hot Friday night last month. I went on the perfect date with New Orleans . Saw live, local music, danced with friends on the stage, then headed home through my neighborhood of craftsman cottages and angel trumpet trees.
A block from my door, I was attacked from behind by a stranger. I escaped, with the help of my roommate. The case is moving forward, so I can't say much more than that.
Now I'm a jilted lover of the city. I'm angry and confused. Which is the real New Orleans? The one that's violent and desperate? Or the one that coos softly, and caresses me? The answer, of course, is both.
I just hauled my things out of New Orleans in a big truck. I am still in love with the city, but it's hard to trust it. Maybe we'll both heal, and the relationship will rekindle. I don't know what - or how long - that might take.
Poor kid.
She sounds like she suffers from Battered Wife Syndrome.
Except it was an abusive city that was doing the betaing.
I’m glad she is getting out of that situation.
She might consider buying a gun to defend herself.
jas3
Guilty.
Stupid woman. Stupid, stupid, stupid woman.
Face it, Eve, baby. The love of your life, New Orleans, always has been and always will be a cesspool.
You've just been lucky that what happened to you hadn't happened sooner. Get out with your life while you still can.
N.O. has no potential to be anything other than what she is. N.O. is filled with people who are convinced that they are perfectly entitled to be ignorant, unproductive and hateful. I say this as someone who has loved N.O. in spite of her copious faults for thirty years.
Bush didn't do this. These people were always there and now they're in charge. The cure would be an honest city and state government and a professional and incorrupt police force. In Nawlins. I jest.
New headline:
Gov’t Tries to Build City Below Sea Level; Residents Abandon
I disagree...
from Hunter speech:
Today, $116 billion has been appropriated to remedy the effects of Katrina. The rebuilding effort includes: $17 billion for housing and community development; $8.4 billion for levees and flood control; $10 billion for Small Business Administration loans; and, $3.5 billion for highways and bridges.
Would be cheaper to raze Nawlins and let the bayou claim it back...
The fact it's now 2 yrs since the levees broke...and most of the city is still in shambles. Is this Bush's fault? No Way...
Yes, it’s a shame, there were few muggings and murders before Katrina...
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I was in Nawlins shortly before Katrina. It was about the same as this girl described before the hurricane, and I never care to go back.
Welcome to a democrat utopia city.
Wife and myself were there just before Christmas of 1995. We couldn’t wait to get back home. It seemed to us that basically was a town where they all got drunk, stayed drunk, and it smelled like a Septic with the lid off. No such fond memories of N.O. as the young lady wrote of.
Can't we all just get along? Mother Blanco and school bus Nagin know what's best for you. Drink the Kool-Aid and stop complaining!
I was in New Orleans last summer for the ALA conference and it was great—but I’ve heard that since then the vermin have been returning home and the place is returning to its depravity.
I remember taking my parents on a tour of the French Quarter. It's sort of like driving through the worst slum of any big city in America, only worse. There were winos passed out in the street, hookers, drug dealers, and garbage was strewn about everywhere. The smell was overwhelming, and it was 10:00 in the morning. Why anybody would choose to live there is beyond me. There are other swamps in America that at least give you a fighting chance for survival.
Wrong answer. The gentle one is a figment of her imagination. It's the one she wants to be true.
Reality has smacked another liberal upside the head.
What should happen to New Orleans is that it should pull back within sustainable boundaries.
She's in love with this hell hole?
Besides, mugging stimulates their economy.
“Which is the real New Orleans”
Obviously he got to see it.
“always has been and always will be a cesspool”
And it will always be 6 ft below sea level.
She should be smart and stay away.
New Orleans has been utterly and irretrievably destroyed. George H.W. Bush must be very proud of his New World Order in operation under his son’s administration. Now we have Count Olav (to borrow from Laura Ingraham) as Attorney General (Holy MOSES!) — a man whose loyalties are as divided as his credibility is non-existent, and now a reasonable useful idiot brought in at Homeland Security
All this while the poppy fields of Afghanistan are ready to produce a huge heroin “crop” while George W. Bush presides.
Why isn’t the USA under George W. Bush fire-bombing the poppy fields of Afghanistan?
And what does that have to do with this pooor soul and the assault in New Orleans? What’s happened to this person is going to happen next to our children if we continue to tolerate the way the Bush administration operates, fails to secure the borders, and allows the world to be glutted with heroin.
This is her explaining her internship with NPR... cute thing..
http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/intern/eve_troeh.ram
Yet lot to learn...
Yes.
I admire anyone who tries to stay and fight for their city instead of running to the suburbs like a pansy. Unfortunately, when there's no city left to fight for, there's no point in staying.
Fixing New Orleans would be easy: declare martial law, patrol the streets in armored Humvees like they do in Anbar, and machine gun anybody who gives you trouble. Establish and enforce a dusk-to-dawn curfew and shoot anyone you see breaking it. Divide the city into Areas of Operation with barbed wire and fortified checkpoints, then clean the crimimals and drug dealers out of each one using paid informants and strike teams. Raze everything below sea level and let it go back to nature, then build new infrastructure on raised land. Disestablish all local government and place it under the command of a general officer operating from a GHQ a la postwar Japan.
All this done well and New Orleans would be a fine place to live in a decade or two.
Today, at 5:30 this morning, a dear friend, Helen Hill, was murdered in her home in Marigny. Her house was broken into and she and her husband were both shot. Their two year old baby was there. Paul, the father survived the shooting. The baby is ok, safe with friends right now.
Sooner or later, another hurricane is going to finish the job that Katrina started. Maybe then, and only then, will that Third World swamp be abandoned.
Not really. NO is still sinking. 15 years or so from now, it’ll be at least another foot lower relative to sea level, perhaps much more.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,243038,00.html
The above is an interesting article from the local fox that gives some insight into the murder of her friend and how they handled it. It is interesting that one of the people carried a sign that attacked people (usually in the Afro-American community) that did not report crimes.
Oddly enough, a political cartoon was critized just the other day for the same message by the NAACP...
“I admire anyone who tries to stay and fight for their city instead of running to the suburbs like a pansy. Unfortunately, when there’s no city left to fight for, there’s no point in staying.
Fixing New Orleans would be easy: declare martial law, patrol the streets in armored Humvees like they do in Anbar, and machine gun anybody who gives you trouble. Establish and enforce a dusk-to-dawn curfew and shoot anyone you see breaking it. Divide the city into Areas of Operation with barbed wire and fortified checkpoints, then clean the crimimals and drug dealers out of each one using paid informants and strike teams. Raze everything below sea level and let it go back to nature, then build new infrastructure on raised land. Disestablish all local government and place it under the command of a general officer operating from a GHQ a la postwar Japan.”
Yeah...that would work...personally I’m looking for Katrina only much stronger to finish that sick old man that is New Orleans off under 30+ feet of water....
Anyone who is dumb enough to build a home under 10 feet of water deserves 20 feet of water to wash away their stupidity...
“Why isn’t the USA under George W. Bush fire-bombing the poppy fields of Afghanistan?”
1. Not enough planes?
2. Not enough fire bombs?
3. Kill farmers?
4. Too spread out as it is?
5. Don’t want junkies going ape on us?
6. We didn’t go into Afghanistan to wipe out the poppies?
When tourists talk about N.O. being a cesspool full of drunks, they are right. It is full of drunken tourists.
They also mean the Downtown Area within a mile or less of the French Quarter.
I was born in N.O. and raised about 20 miles west of there. No sane human being would live in downtown N.O., or Detroit, or D.C. or Philadelphia. The smaller towns around N.O. started having their own Mardi Gras parades years ago, so their citizens could enjoy the culture of Southeast LA, without having to have their children assaulted. Most people who live outside of N.O.in LA avoid Downtown unless they work there, and then they get the heck out before dark.
New Orleans..new theme song
What Have You Done for Me Lately???
This may be completely out of line, but I can’t help thinking:
“Ain’t Karma a bitch???”
President Gore. President Kerry.
He told us the police department was sooooo corrupt and that the city had a thin facade of respectability, covering a filthy, grimy, dishonest center. I loved New Orleans, but I always found his description to be honest. So, I just never looked too deeply. I really, really wish the best for New Orleans. I miss it, but not enough to pay for all their shortcomings.
You, too, huh? I was in mourning for the place until the residents started opening their mouths wanting handouts. I had loved New Orleans all my life until that point. The mourning period was over.
There can little hope for New Orleans, until the rats have been exterminated..
All of them....
Literally...
Nagin is attempting identify the turds in his Easter Basket as “chocolate”...
Well, they aren’t
Read that one can see NO’s true beauty by comparing it to the Islands. New Orleans shouldn’t be seen as the foulest, most crooked, least efficient of American cities, but rather as the cleanest, best-administered, and least-wasteful Caribbean city.
i agree ...they have to WANT it back. THey will have to TAKE it back..but like all dems, they will try to UNDERSTAND why, blame everyone and everything but themselves....sad, very sad...maybe she will wake up..but i wont bet on it...
i dont know about the police so i cant comment..
Here’s a thought: quit voting for dems, and maybe something will get done in New Orleans.
In America we like an underdog, but these people take it too far.
dumba@@
I know several people — some government, some private sector — who have been substantively involved with the N.O. relief effort. They all speak with a mixture of contempt and disgust with the local political structure. N.O. right now is full of outsiders trying to put things back together, but the locals keep throwing up roadblocks.
I have loved New Orleans since the 1970s despite knowing that everything you say here is absolutely true. Filthy, grimy, dishonest. Period. Great food, great music, unbelievable spirit and culture and yet utterly filthy, grimy, and dishonest. That's New Orleans.
But there is one more thing to be said. New Orleans is now run by black people who decry "white racism" whenever anyone raises the issues of corruption and incompetance. Thus there is no accountability.
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