Out of Sight

[cal04]

There are hundreds of children in the trailer camp that is run by FEMA and known as Renaissance Village, but they won’t be having much of a Christmas. They’re trapped here in a demoralizing, overcrowded environment with adults who are mostly broke, jobless and at the end of their emotional tethers. Many of the kids aren’t even going to school.

“This is a terrible environment for children,” said Anita Gentris, who lost everything in the flood that followed Hurricane Katrina and is living in one of the 200-square-foot travel trailers with her 10-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. “My daughter is having bad dreams. And my son, he’s a very angry child right now. He cries. He throws things.

(snip)
The television cameras are mostly gone now, and the many thousands of people from the Gulf Coast whose lives were wrecked by Katrina in the summer of 2005 have slipped from the national consciousness. But like the city of New Orleans itself, most of them have yet to recover.

The enormity of the continuing tragedy is breathtaking. Thousands upon thousands of people are still suffering. And yet the way the poorest and most vulnerable victims have been treated so far by government officials at every level has been disgraceful.


BOB HERBERT
http://wealthyfrenchman.blogspot.com/

[blitzen]

1. here's a related story on the backlash they are suffering

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/4938701.html

[williesgirl]

2. k&r

[ninkasi]

3. I wish I had the eloquence

that so many talented DUers do. When I read stories like this, there is so very much I want to say regarding the degrading treatment of our fellow citizens, and the criminal negligence of the Bush administration in helping these Americans. I watched New Orleans drown on my t.v., and grew more and more shocked that no help came. People were herded into a stadium like so many cattle, with no food, water, and broken sanitary facilities.

I watched bodies float by, and saw people stranded on rooftops, filmed by t.v. crews who apparently had no trouble entering the city the U.S. government couldn't seem to remember, or care about. Money for war? Sure, I hear with increasing regularity about emergency funding for the 2 billion or so a week we're pouring into desert sands, but citizens who in many cases had little to begin with, have had that taken from them, along with their dignity.

How DARE Bush claim to be a man who talks to God. How DARE he claim to be a christian. He couldn't be troubled to do anything for NOLA until it became a publicity problem, and then all he did was fly in and out enough times to make speeches promising all kinds of things, and those promises are still un-kept. Blackwater profited, and all the usual cronies got even richer, but the people of the Gulf coast got misery, heartache, and betrayal.

And to think that the arrogant egomaniac claims that it is his mission to bring democracy to the Middle East, even if he has to kill every Muslim there to do it. Meanwhile, the people of NOLA, and Baton Rouge continue to slide deeper and deeper into despair, and the cost of a month in Iraq could go a long, long way to helping them. I know that it's been said that the election last month was about Iraq, and while it's true that it was, it was also about the abandonment of our fellow citizens on the Gulf Coast. A life lost in combat, or a life lost to a disaster is still a life lost, and the post traumatic stress that many of our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are, and will continue to suffer, are no more real than the post traumatic stress being suffered now by the citizens of America's abandoned citizens.

[babylonsister]

4. K&R! We need to be reminded daily. nt