New Orleans September 2005

As our esteemed "cheerleader" (so tagged by an astute Blogger) JohnM blogged this morning, New Orleans kinda eclipses everything else for the forseeable future. From news clips alone it would seem that by far the largest number of victims of Katrina are Black. What's to be made of that fact (if it's true)?  

I can repeat what a New Orleans resident, an artist and musician, an elderly Black male, said on National Public Radio yesterday. He said he was angry. In fact, he said that the Mississippi River had brought the White Man's refuse to New Orleans for more than two hundred years where it was turned into art and culture. New Orleans, he said, wasn't destroyed by a hurricane, it was slowly destroyed by "neglect." Since the chief instrument of the destruction was broken levees it'd be hard to argue with him.

New Orleans will rise again. Just you wait 'Enry 'Iggins' just you wait. After a suitable period of mourning, and we are in mourning, the subject of New Orleans' future will become hotly, white hotly political. Hillary, or any other Democrat running in '08, will cry out for the complete rebuilding of New Orleans, while the Republicans will intone the wisdom of doing what's 'feasible.' Prediction: guilt and goodness, and hunger for votes, will propel the Democrats to victory. Notice how quiet the Black leaders are for the moment? Ominous, for their enemies.

Here's a little refresher from my own, personal experience in Mobile, Alabama when I was about 20.  Mobile, like a couple of other Gulf States towns and cities, engages in ship building and ship maintenance. As crew on an American flag ore ship we were drydocked for a week or so in Mobile. On the bus going into town I stood in the back of the crowded bus. The driver refused to go on until I came to the front and sat down. I didn't want to.  But the Black passengers wanted me to not make waves, so I came to the front.  Hey, I had not a lick of the pluck of Rosa Parks! Ha!  Even then, for me, a white rube not long from Australia, where I lived from age 3 to age 16, it all seemed kinda stupid. But then I hadn't been conditioned by hundreds of years of ugly prejudice. All through my last two years of HS in San Francisco I went from 947 Green Street, to Lowell High School then on Hayes Street, on a public bus sitting in the back with my left foot on the metal bubble over the left rear wheels. It was a ritual. I smoked a cigarette, secretly. So, on the bus in Mobile I was trying to do what I had always done, just as the bus driver was doing what he'd always done, and the gracious, lovely Black passengers were doing what they'd always done.

Now a hurricane and a broken levee or two has woken us the heck up. Oh, oh, oh, I must, I simply must end this and write to Hillary immediately!  I have a grand scheme of victory for her to get the entire black vote in the South!

May God please bless every victim of the catastrophe no matter their color, religion, or politics.

Barry