http://cvilleindymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=2102 Well worth the read...
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New Orleans, Two Reports
No Justice-- Alexis Zeigler
"There's no phone. The electricity comes and goes. The gas just got turned on, so now we have hot water, but don't drink the tap water without boiling it." Such was my introduction to the ninth ward, the area of New Orleans that the vast majority of America would never have heard of were it not for Hurricane Katrina.
<snip> Still, the conditions are remarkably third world. There are no grocery stores, no drug stores, almost no services of any kind beyond a few liquor stores.
Survival involves regular trips to soup kitchens, and poking through MREs (Meals Ready to Eat, compliments of the military) trying to find edible material. The air smells foul, some combination of sewage, trash, and just plain rot. There are mountainous piles of refuse everywhere, in the street, blocking the street. Pieces of buildings, pieces of people's lives piled made into trash and piled in the street. One house two doors down from us simply had the front removed by the storm, a cutaway section of Americana, a perfectly arranged living room exposed to the street.
<snip>In the ninth ward, there is little sign of recovery beyond a very few individual homeowners and business people shoveling out, repairing and rebuilding. One sees no city workers, no recovery contractors.
<snip>
Beyond the gentrified upper edge of the upper ninth, where the streets have been cleaned, and the power stays on, there is little sign of any reconstruction in the ninth ward. The word here is that they are simply going to let things languish until they can come in with the bulldozers. Already people are preparing for that, with signs of "No Bulldozing" springing up in an almost uninhabited landscape.
<snip>
There are food kitchens in various areas, some set up by independent groups, some by churches, some by the Red Cross. The Red Cross food distribution center has its own Blackwater Security (private security agency with ties to the Bush Administration) milling among the crowd, each carrying nothing but a gun and numerous spare clips of ammunition on their belts, as if the dispersed and hungry people who come might somehow form a spontaneous insurrection. The military retains a presence here as well, as various heavy brown and green vehicles lumber occasionally through the neighborhoods. One finds them parked occasionally as well, in various corners of the city, with distinctly bored soldiers sitting atop them, passing the day to what end no one knows.
All over the ninth ward there are the ubiquitous spray painted signs of the rescue workers, marking every house, numbering the dead and alive. Near the tracks where the water was particularly deep, one finds the bones of decaying canine corpses, and the spray painted signs marking the places where human remains were found. The local animal rescue followed behind the rescue workers, painting each house on their own. In an area where many of the churches are nothing but piles of rubble, the door of one of the few churches still standing bears the sign, spraypainted by an animal rescue worker, "God Created Animals Equal Too."
<snip>
Uptown New Orleans might as well be another planet. Well-groomed people sit in coffee shops, one laptop computer for every two people, and sip expensive frothy drinks. As one enters the wealthier uptown area, suddenly the threating spray painted signs appear. "Looters will be shot," "Looters shot on sight," a number of variations on that theme. In the ninth ward itself, there are not such signs.
<snip>
In uptown, there is no spraypaint on the houses, but as one travels in any direction away from the wealthy neighborhoods, the racial segregation of New Orleans is clearly marked by the spray paint of Animal Rescue. As soon as you see spray painted houses, you know they belong to black people. On the side of an abandoned van, the animal rescue gets a return message. "Animal Rescue Fuck Off, Stop Stealing Our Pets."
<snip>
Disaster Tourism--by Jennifer Connor
So what is New Orleans like three months later? A little dryer, a little destroyed- and where is it going from here?
<snip>
Sometimes I feel like I am on an island here, totally disconnected from the rest of the country. It seems like we don't get a lot of news in and it feels like most news doesn't get out or has been superseded by the next tragedy. I hate to think of where the tsunami victims must be a year later; they are so 2004. I witness destruction here and realize that I am experiencing shock over old news, and the real shock is that so little progress has been made. The shock is that this feels normal to me now when it is really messed up.
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