[NYTr] New Orleans: America's Open Wound
ny...@olm.blythe-systems.com
sent by Ed Pearl
The New York Times - Dec 21, 2006
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/opinion/21herbert.html
America's Open Wound
By BOB HERBERT
New Orleans
It's eerie. The air is still. There is no noise. Night is falling. The five
stone steps in front of me once led to a porch, or maybe directly to the
front door of a house. There is no way to be sure. The house is completely
gone. All that's left are the five steps, one of which is painted with the
address, 1630 Reynes St. The steps sit alone, like a piece of minimalist
art, at the front of a small vacant lot full of weeds and rubble. Next door
is a house that is completely capsized, fallen over on its side like a
sunken ship.
Welcome to the Lower Ninth Ward. You won't find much holiday spirit here. In
every direction, as far as it is possible to see, is devastation.
On another lot, piled high with the rubble of a ruined house, I saw a
middle-aged man standing in the front yard weeping. He wore a dirty white
baseball cap and he was sobbing like a child. I walked toward him to ask a
question but he waved me away.
Whatever you've heard about New Orleans, the reality is much worse. Think of
it as a vast open wound, this once-great American city that is still largely
in ruins, with many of its people still writhing in agony more than a year
after the catastrophic flood that followed Hurricane Katrina.
Enormous stretches of the city, mile after mile after mile, have been
abandoned. The former residents have doubled-up or tripled-up with
relatives, or found shelter in the ubiquitous white trailers of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, or moved (in some cases permanently) to Texas,
Mississippi, Georgia and beyond. Some have simply become homeless.
"This is a ghostly city, if you ask me," said Sheila Etheridge, a waitress
whose home was destroyed and whose three children are staying with relatives
near Atlanta. "It gets real spooky when the sun goes down. They let me sleep
in the back of the restaurant. But I'll tell you the truth, we don't have
too many customers. You see what those neighborhoods are like. They're
empty. The people gone."
The recovery in New Orleans has gone about as well as the war in Iraq.
In mid-September 2005, with parts of the city still submerged and soldiers
from the 82nd Airborne Division on patrol, President Bush made a dramatic,
flood-lit appearance in historic Jackson Square. In a nationally televised
speech he promised not only to do all that he could to rebuild the Gulf
Coast, but also to confront the terrible problem of deep and persistent
poverty.
"That poverty," said the president, "has roots in a history of racial
discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.
We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."
Now, more than a year later, the population of New Orleans is less than half
what it was before the storm. The federal government has allocated billions
for the city's recovery but much of that money has been wasted or remains
hopelessly tied up in the bureaucracy. Very little has gotten to the
neediest victims, the people who were poor to begin with and then lost their
homes and their livelihoods to the storm.
Many of the city's hospitals and schools remain closed. Some will never
reopen. There is very little public transportation. The politicians have
come up with a stunning array of post-Katrina initiatives, but one grandiose
recovery plan after another has faltered.
The terrible experience of the flood and its aftermath has left an imprint
on the minds of most residents that's as distinct as the water lines that
stain so many of the city's buildings. A cabdriver's voice faltered as he
told me about an obese woman who put pillows under her arms as the
floodwaters were rising. She thought the pillows would help her float.
"She drowned," the driver said.
Emotional and psychological problems are rampant, but there is a drastic
shortage of mental health professionals to treat them. People are suffering
from severe anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and other illnesses. Doctors
told me that large numbers of mentally ill individuals have gone more than a
year without taking their prescribed medication.
Many of the poor residents in the city feel that they've been abandoned by
the government and the rest of America, and that the president broke his
promise to help. "We're in terrible trouble down here," said a woman named
Delores Goode, who stood outside the Superdome asking passers-by if they
knew where she might find work as a baby sitter. "We were all over the
television last year. Now we're back to being nobody."
*
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