“Let them eat cake:” New Orleans deserves better treatment

The city of New Orleans and I go way back.

My life’s greatest adventures can be traced back to the French Quarter’s grimy streets and, of all places hit by Katrina, it has been unbearable watching that city suffer this apocalyptic nightmare.

We’ve seen all the images: homes torn to splinters, starving babies and bodies left nameless and discarded like trash.

And now is the time to get angry.

Do I agree with what Kanye West and so many others have said, that “Bush doesn’t care about Blacks?” No. But no one, even his supporters, can honestly say this president has ever begun to understand the plight of those hanging from the bottom rung of the economic ladder, and this has never been clearer.

For example, in Washington, Bush, the so-called strong leader, directed Katrina victims to a Web-site and a toll-free telephone number for help. To me, that sounds a lot like, “Let them eat cake.”

If this hurricane had struck Anaheim, CA or, say, a swing-state during an election year, those corpses would not remain rotting in the alleys. New Orleans was handed third-world treatment because, for this administration, the lives of its inhabitants are as distant as the third-world itself. The birthplace of jazz deserves better, Mr. President.

In New Orleans, from the affluent conventioners to the saxophone playing homeless, nowhere is the concept of two, disparate Americas more obvious.

When I was 18, I received a crash-course in what daily life for New Orleans’ poor entailed. When trying to break up a fight near Bourbon St., I was arrested and thrown into what is undoubtedly one of the worst jail systems in the United States. For 21 hours, in that crowded cell, I met people whose crimes included sleeping on park benches, telling fortunes without a permit, and rummaging through public garbage.

They represented a people the government, both local and federal, had turned their backs on: the 36 million Americans who live in poverty.

The images of the Gulf, as well as the embarrassing recovery response should serve as a wake-up call to the more comfy confines of this country, teaching us that our hearts should have gone out to them long before the carnage of Katrina.

The Crescent City is destroyed for now, but we have a new opportunity. I hope the victims’ faces we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks continue to haunt us, preventing us from simply looking away. So many of our people, whether they live on the Gulf Coast or in Milledgeville, will need our concern long after this disaster, just as they needed it before. Maybe this was the boost we needed.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 16 2005. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry