It was a shining, gateway city
It was a shining, gateway city
filled with parades,
and tradition,
and art,
and music.
The city was protected from the sea by powerful levees whose builders knew they could be destroyed by a powerful storm.
The city was ruled over by an incompetent king
who surrounded himself with aristocrats who called themselves "conservatives".
They reviled the poor, and took comfort in demeaning people for being different.
They wouldn't pay to keep the levees strong.
One day, a terrible storm did come.
The King and his conservative aristocrats were warned.
They didn't save the poor who could not escape the storm. [If you only watch one video, watch this one.]
Many couldn't leave the city.
The storm breached the levees.
The city drowned.
The King's greedy aristocrats failed to save the people.
The King's aristocrats mocked the poor people in their time of suffering and misery.
The King praised his conservative aristocrats.
Many people died.
The King promised to rebuild the city, even better than before.
The conservative aristocrats became richer, and richer, and richer,
and richer.
The aristocrats did little to rebuild the city or help the poor.
The people never trusted them again.
Years later, the city still languished.
For many, it was a shadow of its former joyous glory.
No one believed the conservative king, or his aristocrats.
The king heaped power and glory on his aristocrats, despite their failures, which he tried to hide.
In the face of the betrayals of the King and his conservative aristocrats, the people still celebrated, still sang, still dreamt of a better day.
They did whatever they could to rebuild the glory of the great American city called New Orleans.
Down with the King.
Most of us have our Katrina stories. The night that Katrina hit, I was up all night watching it on CNN. Thinking that the worst was over and the city was spared, I was just about to go to bed in the wee hours of the morning when they reported from one of the hospitals that flooding was occuring and rising rapidly and they didn't know where the water was coming from. They were making plans to evacuated patients, and I knew this meant something real bad was going on, so I stayed up round the clock to watch it all. And stayed that way for the next two weeks (thank you, CNN). And of course the rest is history.
On the politics of all of this, I agree that Bush and his administration have been terrible in the aftermath of this event. But we shouldn't forget the wrongs committed by the mayor of New Orleans, who left all those buses that were supposed to be used to evacuate people in a low-lying parking area, only to be flooded. And don't forget that he was holed up in a hotel for crucial days after the hurricane instead of being in charge of his city. What a coward.
I have nothing good to say about Ray Nagin. He and several previous adminstrations had many chances to do something about the deplorable poverty, illiteracy, and crime in the black community of that city, and did nothing for all those years. He let his own people down.
I worked in the administration of Moon Landrieu in the mid-70's prior to going into the military, and I have much admiration for that entire Democratic family. Landrieu was a mayor who did a whole lot of good for the city, both black and white. And it made me sick when his wonderful son, Mitch, lost the post-Katrina election to Nagin. Mitch Landriew would have been an excellent mayor and would have had New Orleans on the fast-track to recovery by now.
How can some voters be so dumb?
