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  #121  
Old 09-04-2005, 05:49 PM
Jessica Leigh Jessica Leigh is offline
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Originally Posted by sodascouts
And I find it disgusting how everybody seems more eager to find someone to blame and condemn than to focus on the positives that people are getting saved and helped. It frustrates me that people like you believe they have the answers to everything, and therefore self-righteously going around proclaiming it. Did you read the answers about buses posted earlier? Guess what. It's not as simple as you'd like to think and maybe someone needs to tell you that. Sorry if you don't like it.
AMEN!!! thank you Nancy!
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  #122  
Old 09-04-2005, 05:50 PM
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Brwn_eyes0511 Brwn_eyes0511 is offline
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Originally Posted by Jessica Leigh
some of us actually live like that and have a big problem with people begging us for our money. i'm still waiting to find out what kind of financial aid i'm going to get this semester so i can see if i can afford student health insurance. if not, then i have another semester of driving to mexico for my prescriptions. beer? that would be nice. i'm not giving anyone money for beer unless they return the favor.
RIGHT ON SISTER!
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  #123  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:07 PM
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strandinthewind strandinthewind is offline
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Originally Posted by Jessica Leigh
some of us actually live like that and have a big problem with people begging us for our money. i'm still waiting to find out what kind of financial aid i'm going to get this semester so i can see if i can afford student health insurance. if not, then i have another semester of driving to mexico for my prescriptions. beer? that would be nice. i'm not giving anyone money for beer unless they return the favor.
Well, I think it is a little disingenuous to assume that companies like the Red Cross, when it or they are allowed by FEMA, give people beer istead of food, shelter, medication, etc. Thus, even a $5.00 donation to a legit company should allay any fear about the distribution of funds to buy alcohol.

Also, no one faults anyone if they cannot make a donation. Donations are personal things Interestingly, taxation in America is a huge way of making donations to the poor and, sadly, others like large corporations, but that is a whole other topic

PS. don't get me started on why you have to drive to Mexico to get you medication for less money
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  #124  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:08 PM
GateandGarden GateandGarden is offline
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Default Wow, what a headache this thread causes

I don't know everything. I think I've made that clear enough. But I do have some level of common sense. And so I cannot believe that people don't see how much more could have been done much earlier. I'd like to focus on how wonderful it is that so many people are okay but thousands of people aren't!

I'm actually there, more so than pretty much everyone on here, am I right? I've seen many of the things that others have only read about. No, that doesn't make me better than anyone or anything of the sort; I just happen to be practically in the middle of it without actually being in it. It's just plain to me that more should have been done. It just blows my mind that someone would say otherwise.

Another thing about people who didn't leave, whether they could or did not have the means--this is Louisiana. It's like hurricane central here. It seems like we're told all the time that "this is gonna be the big one" and it never is. People have been hearing that all their lives. Is it such a shock that a lot of people would have considered this one another false alarm?
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  #125  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:09 PM
Jessica Leigh Jessica Leigh is offline
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Originally Posted by strandinthewind
Well, I think it is a little disingenuous to assume that companies like the Red Cross, when it or they are allowed by FEMA, give people beer istead of food, shelter, medication, etc. Thus, even a $5.00 donation to a legit company should allay any fear about the distribution of funds to buy alcohol.

Also, no one faults anyone if they cannot make a donation. Donations are personal things Interestingly, taxation in America is a huge way of making donations to the poor and, sadly, others like large corporations, but that is a whole other topic

PS. don't get me started on why you have to drive to Mexico to get you medication for less money
no sweetie i was talking about the homeless people discussion from many pages ago. i've already donated to red cross for the hurricane (they even gave me a cool visor that says "save the south" )
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  #126  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:10 PM
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Originally Posted by Jessica Leigh
no sweetie i was talking about the homeless people discussion from many pages ago. i've already donated to red cross for the hurricane (they even gave me a cool visor that says "save the south" )

- its hard to keep up
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  #127  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:11 PM
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Originally Posted by GateandGarden
I don't know everything. I think I've made that clear enough. But I do have some level of common sense. And so I cannot believe that people don't see how much more could have been done much earlier. I'd like to focus on how wonderful it is that so many people are okay but thousands of people aren't!

I'm actually there, more so than pretty much everyone on here, am I right? I've seen many of the things that others have only read about. No, that doesn't make me better than anyone or anything of the sort; I just happen to be practically in the middle of it without actually being in it. It's just plain to me that more should have been done. It just blows my mind that someone would say otherwise.

Another thing about people who didn't leave, whether they could or did not have the means--this is Louisiana. It's like hurricane central here. It seems like we're told all the time that "this is gonna be the big one" and it never is. People have been hearing that all their lives. Is it such a shock that a lot of people would have considered this one another false alarm?
Great post! I agree about the false alarm thing. I live in North Carolina which is the most heavy hit state by hurricanes, next to Florida! They always tell us it is going to be REALLY BAD!
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  #128  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:13 PM
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strandinthewind strandinthewind is offline
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Originally Posted by Brwn_eyes0511
Great post! I agree about the false alarm thing. I live in North Carolina which is the most heavy hit state by hurricanes, next to Florida! They always tell us it is going to be REALLY BAD!
. . . and if FEMA had an evacuation plan that took years to develop and they inexplicably stopped implementing that plan for five days - I hope you are able to chalk it up to "let's focus on the positive."
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  #129  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:14 PM
Jessica Leigh Jessica Leigh is offline
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Originally Posted by strandinthewind
- its hard to keep up
it's ok... i know it's hard to keep up... i'm slow in responding to things on weekends- i work all weekend and most of you have weekends off so your conversations move so fast!
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  #130  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:24 PM
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September 4, 2005
What Happens to a Race Deferred
By JASON DePARLE
WASHINGTON

THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn.

In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race and class found themselves slack-jawed.

"This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society - in a literal way," said Christopher Jencks, a sociologist glued to the televised images from his office at Harvard. Surprised to have found himself surprised, Mr. Jencks took to thinking out loud. "Maybe it's just an in-the-face version of something I already knew," he said. "All the people who don't get out, or don't have the resources, or don't believe the warning are African-American."

"It's not that it's at odds with the way I see American society," Mr. Jencks said. "But it's at odds with the way I want to see American society."

Last week it was how others saw American society, too, in images beamed across the globe. Were it not for the distinctive outlines of the Superdome, the pictures of hovering rescue helicopters might have carried a Somalian dateline. The Sri Lankan ambassador offered to help raise foreign aid.

Anyone who knew New Orleans knew that danger lurked behind the festive front. Let the good times roll, the tourists on Bourbon Street were told. Yet in every season, someone who rolled a few blocks in the wrong direction wound up in the city morgue.

Unusually poor ( 27.4 percent below the poverty line in 2000), disproportionately black (over two-thirds), the Big Easy is also disproportionately murderous - with a rate that was for years among the country's highest.

Once one of the most mixed societies, in recent decades, the city has become unusually segregated, and the white middle class is all but gone, moved north across Lake Pontchartrain or west to Jefferson Parish - home of David Duke, the one-time Klansman who ran for governor in 1991 and won more than half of the state's white vote.

Shortly after I arrived in town two decades ago as a fledgling reporter, I was dispatched to cover a cheerleading tryout, and I asked a grinning, half-drunk accountant where he was from, city or suburb. "White people don't live in New Orleans," he answered with a where-have-you-been disdain.

For those who loved it, its glories as well as its flaws, last week brought only heartbreak. So much of New Orleans, from its music and its food to its architecture, had shown a rainbow society at its best, even as everyone knew it was more complicated than that.

"New Orleans, first of all, is both in reality and in rhetoric an extraordinarily successful multicultural society," said Philip Carter, a developer and retired journalist whose roots in the city extend back more at least four generations. "But is also a multicultural society riven by race and class, and all this has been exposed by these stormy days. The people of our community are pitted against each other across the barricades of race and class that six months from now may be last remaining levees in New Orleans."

No one was immune, of course. With 80 percent of the city under water, tragedy swallowed the privilege and poor, and traveled spread across racial lines.

But the divides in the city were evident in things as simple as access to a car. The 35 percent of black households that didn't have one, compared with just 15 percent among whites.

"The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out," said Craig E. Colten, a geologist at Louisiana State University and an expert on the city's vulnerable topography. "They didn't have buses. They didn't have trains."

As if to punctuate the divide, the water especially devastated the Ninth Ward, among city's poorest and lowest lying.

"Out West, there is a saying that water flows to money," Mr. Colten said. "But in New Orleans, water flows away from money. Those with resources who control where the drainage goes have always chosen to live on the high ground. So the people in the low areas were hardest hit."

Outrage grew as the week wore on, among black politicians who saw the tragedy as a reflection of a broader neglect of American cities, and in the blogosphere.

"The real reason no one is helping is because of the color of these people!" wrote "myfan88" on the Flickr blog. "This is Hotel Rwanda all over again."

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by legal segregation laws?" wrote Mark Naison, director of the urban studies program at Fordham, on another blog.

One question that could not be answered last week was whether, put to a similar test, other cities would fracture along the same lines.

AT one level, everything about New Orleans appears sui generis, not least its location below sea level. Many New Orleanians don't just accept the jokes about living in a Banana Republic. They spread them.

But in a quieter catastrophe, the 1995 heat wave that killed hundreds of Chicagoans, blacks in comparable age groups as whites died at higher rates - in part because they tended to live in greater social isolation, in depopulated parts of town. As in New Orleans, space intertwined with race.

And the violence? Similarly shocking scenes had erupted in Los Angeles in 1992, after the acquittal of white police officers charged with beating a black man, Rodney King. Newark, Detroit, Washington -all burned in the race riots of the 1960's. It was for residents of any major city, watching the mayhem, to feel certain their community would be immune.

With months still to go just to pump out the water that covers the city, no one can be sure how the social fault lines will rearrange. But with white flight a defining element of New Orleans in the recent past, there was already the fear in the air this week that the breached levee would leave a separated society further apart.

``Maybe we can build the levees back," said Mr. Carter. ``But that sense of extreme division by class and race is going to long survive the physical reconstruction of New Orleans."


www.nytimes.com
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  #131  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:27 PM
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hmmm....

Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00

'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...
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  #132  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:33 PM
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gldstwmn gldstwmn is offline
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Originally Posted by Mad4stevie
Did you see the interview on Meet the Press with the Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, La.? He broke down while telling NBC's Tim Russert the story of the death of the mother of one of the parish’s employees.

Go to www.msnbc.com and click on Video: She Drowned Friday Night.

So very sad.
I saw that.
On Monday: "Don't worry Mama we're coming."
On Tuesday:"Don't worry Mama we're coming."
On Wednesday:"Don't worry Mama we're coming."
On Thursday:"Don't worry Mama we're coming."
On Friday:"Don't worry Mama we're coming."

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  #133  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:33 PM
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Originally Posted by sodascouts
And I find it disgusting how everybody seems more eager to find someone to blame and condemn than to focus on the positives that people are getting saved and helped. It frustrates me that people like you believe they have the answers to everything, and therefore self-righteously going around proclaiming it. Did you read the answers about buses posted earlier? Guess what. It's not as simple as you'd like to think and maybe someone needs to tell you that. Sorry if you don't like it.
Your president is incompetent. Sorry if you don't like it.
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  #134  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:38 PM
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Originally Posted by estranged4life
We all will pay for this too. Watch how our insurance goes up and gas will go up more.
Driving in America is going to become passe'.
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  #135  
Old 09-04-2005, 06:39 PM
Jessica Leigh Jessica Leigh is offline
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Originally Posted by Brwn_eyes0511


hmmm....

Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00

'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...
people were hiding in their homes from police officers knocking on doors trying to evacuate people. i don't believe that everyone could have been saved and taken to safe places but i do believe that efforts were made to help people who were too poor to help themselves. there were many people who chose to stay- I'm sure Fats Domino, for example, had the financial means to flee... but he chose to stay. this is not completely a separation of poor v. not poor or black v. white.

(before anyone jumps on my back i want to say that i'm only referring to the evacuation process, not how quickly or not quickly aid was sent)
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