Looter Guy up!!
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.
Looter Guy up!!
Yeah, she's started on her journey to become a conservative. She'll be there in about another 8 years.
I was there in the mid 70’s and it was that way then. I used to place my football bets with a city policeman.
Nobody with the means let their kids attend the public school back then.
And the talk back then was what would happen if the canal pumps ever failed.
New Orleans is returning to its old self.
What do the following cities all have in common: New Orleans, Detroit, Newark, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Oakland? Discuss amongst yourselves.
- I guess it just must be my MN "foundation" that makes me agree with you completely!
Course..WHAT were my people” thinking when they settled in a frozen tundra??? I’m STILL trying to figure that out.
Not mine either.
And I’d add, there are some people so stupid and/or insane, they remain liberals. So unfortunately, that dictum doesn’t hold true.
After all, look at 9/11. For a short while it seemed maybe everybody was a conservative - we were attacked and killed by foreign religious-nut scum! But now, they’re back to defending these scum.
After all, look at 9/11. For a short while it seemed maybe everybody was a conservative - we were attacked and killed by foreign religious-nut scum! But now, they’re back to defending these scum.
It only seemed that way because liberals went ‘quiet’ for a time after 9/11.
Now, they pretended it never happened.
Having just returned from a 3-day convention (my first visit) I have to say that what I saw on the local t.v. stations, listening to locals and going out and about that my overall impression matches your's. My (upscale) hotel's gift shop promenantly displayed print t-shirts outside the store with FEMA abbreviated as: Fix Everything My A@@. A good summation was given at a bar by a tearful, sobbing woman in her 50s who was going on about how bad things were since Bush was elected with N.O. the epicenter of America's failings. Running down the list from the stock market, to 9/11, to the Columbia, to Katrina, the housing market, etc. ...they were all essentially Bush's fault.
All in all it was enough for me to write off the people and therefore their city. They're finished, really. It's reminiscent of how the Soviet Union and Cuba would blame "counter-revolutionaires" and the West for their system's social and economic failings.
I mentioned to a co-worker they might as well just get another Cat. 5 in there ASAP and finish N.O. off rather than waste more time and money prolonging the inevitable. And it is inevitable because from what I could see the locals take no responsibility for themselves or their city.
with all this poor NOLA stories... We need to be reminded that thugs were looting stores, shooting at rescue helicopters, shooting at randam people, going in to hospitals and holding guns on nurses and drs, to get drugs for their daily habits. They were far from innocent. I remember when the plane loads landing in my West Texas town, many of them were the last ones out and many many of them had brand new sports shirts on with the little tag still on the back side. We had child molesters, criminals etc. that we caught and put in our jails. I worked intake for 42 hours when that all happened and I will never ever forget the people I saw and babies I held so their mom’s could go to hospital because of dt’s.
In case you didn't notice, running New Orleans isn't among the duties of the President. Saving people from floods isn't among the duties of FEMA. Regardless of the very successful campaign to shift blame for the POST Katrina disaster, the true blame rests on the State and City politicians and their decades of corrupt neglect. The current administration is taking the blame for not fixing in two years what two or three generations of Landreaus have wrought.
Nah. They tell us it was BUSH’S *IDEA*. The same man they call stupid.
LOL, you've summed up New Orleans very well! I've been there a few times and this is exactly what I observed. It's a shame, because it IS a really pretty and charming place.
That is correct.
However, when I visited downtown NO about 10 years ago, I saw a bum drinking a beer that was thrown out in a trash dumpster. That image of NO has never left my mind.
Thank goodness there is absolutely no crime anywhere else in this country!
Right, the heroin is . . . DING! Bush’s fault. Please.
Here’s the problem with drugs - there’s a demand for them. Heroin is one of those drugs for which there is a demand. Every product has a target demographic. Heroin has its target demo too. Derelicts.
You need to seat the blame for drugs where it belongs - the users.
Either take control of the supply, or kill off the demand. Pick one or both. Interdiction is a non-starter. The bad guy has better intelligence than we do. Intelligence is everything.
At the same time, you can go after the dealers and their suppliers, but you have to execute them, or they’ll just chalk up jail as the price of doing business. You have to limit it to one appeal too, or they’ll run their business from death row.
Drugs are about economics. The disincentives have to be higher than the potential upside. Failing that, you have to wipe out your competition, which means legalizing it, and that’s not going to happen.
Legalized gambling has put a fairly large dent in the mob. The unions are on the wane too.
Bush’s fault. Please.
Could it have something to do with a group that votes 90% Democrat?
You did not go to the right places and do the right things. Bourbon Street is one big smelly tourist trap.
As a former resident, I can tell you that she nails the analogy.
Strange, isn’t it? I love it like no other place on earth. But I broke it off - moved away.
The fatalism, the sense of impending doom and inevitable collapse are actually part of the weird charm. It’s almost macabre. No wonder Poe lived there.
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