that garbage in our backyard

People are so shocked, appalled, surprised by the looting, raping, killing that went on in and around the Superdome.

Do people in this country not realize this is a daily reality for the people we hide in our projects?

We sit in our Pottery Barn leather chair, sipping Starbucks with that college degree certificate on the wall -- that education at least partly paid for by our parents. We shake our heads, look down our noses at them saying "well they deserve to live in poverty if they're too lazy to WORK for a living. We EARNED what we have here."

I dunno about you, but I didn't EARN the priviledge of being born a white woman to a man with masters degrees in Engineering & Physics from a top university. I didn't EARN the priviledge of growing up in a cute pretty home in an upper middle-class neighborhood host to good elementary and high schools with state champion programs. These were all things that were handed to me by devine luck. And all these things held my hand through my development and are 90% responsible, in my opinion, for any success I've enjoyed in life.

From what I heard growing up, projects like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor homes (Chicago) were nearly like prison/war zones 24/7. I remember taking the Halsted bus to ballet class every morning from my hipster Lakeview 3 flat past Cabrini Green. As the bus cruised between North and Division, all of us would hunker down so we wouldn't be exposed in the windows should any gunfire fly from the projects.

Now imagine being 7 years old, about 50 pounds, about 3 feet tall. And to go to school, you have to walk past drug dealers and gangs firing the same guns we feared on that Halsted bus. Would you go to school every day if doing so meant you may lose your life? What if you're a young boy being raised by a single mom and you know, by leaving her home alone, she's vulnerable to that rapist down the hall and the locks on the door haven't been sturdy for years.

I remember skipping school for a week becuase I no longer could withstand the teasing from my classmates. If they were 100 pounds heavier with guns and knives....well....

So we here in the US have shoved what we don't want to see in the dark alleys, dirty and dangerous buildings grouped together out of the way so we don't have to be reminded of them and our failure as a society to help them.

Kinda like the crap you put behind your garage because you don't want to look at it, yet for some reason you know you can't destroy it?

Putting it behind the garage doesn't improve the conditions of the undesirables.

It doesn't make it go away.

It just sits there getting more decrepit.

Am I the only one who sees all Katrina did was destroy the garage so we're forced to see what we've been hiding behind it for decades?

what was washed away, and what remains

by Rabbi David Wolpe

One of the great novels of our time, 'Remembrance of Things Past' is a sustained meditation on the meaning of memory. The author, Marcel Proust, is haunted by memory. His entire artistic life was given to evocations of his past. His work, in several volumes, delicately traces the web of recollection from early childhood. His book is an elegy to a lost world, the world of his youth.

Proust was Jewish, and it is likely that his ancestry sparked some of his obsession with memory. Jews are afflicted by memory, uplifted and impelled by it. To be a Jew is to dote on the past, to understand what has changed; to recognize not only what has been gained, but what has been lost.

Jewish memory teaches us that things do not remain as they were. It helps us overcome the sense of our own invulnerability, and the permanence of the world. It is an early and innocent belief of life that things do not change -- that nothing will fade, or break, or die. That sentiment soon disappears; it roars out of the broken dam of our first tragedy, our first experience with what can never return. Then we remember what was, and in the act of memory is the recognition of loss.

As we grow, we become increasingly aware that life is studded by loss. Some losses are small, inconsequential. Others shake the roots of our lives.

Watching the news this week from a safe niche far from the hurricane, I saw devastating pictures of loss. The most permanent fixtures of being -- homes, businesses, life itself -- were torn away in an instant.

It was an inexplicable burst of tragedy. No answer can magically soothe the scars of desolation. Nonetheless Judaism, with its insistence on memory, provides some context for such a horrible event.

At the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur we mourn the impermanence of life. We speak about the brief years we are granted on earth, how all of our accomplishments are rooted in time. Inevitably, we scan the synagogue for those who worshipped with us last year who are now gone.

Reinforcing the theme of impermanence, Yom Kippur is followed by Sukkot. On Sukkot we read the book of Ecclesiastes, with its insistence on the brevity and evanescence of all things. During that week we also we dwell in a sukkah, a flimsy hut that temporarily serves as a home.

According to Jewish law, a sukkah must not be too sturdy. Building a sukkah is way of saying "You see, our structures are fragile and fleeting. Each year we build them, and a week later we tear them down. That which we imagine will last forever briefly flickers on this earth, and is gone."

Our tradition teaches transience. Do not think that steel and stone will last forever. Loss is ingrained in life. There is a time for everything, the author of Ecclesiastes assures us, which means that there is another time when that thing will be no more.

Yet this teaching of transience is not so that we will be left with despair. It encourages us to search for that which is permanent. The sukkah may be temporary, but the memory of building it has lasted for three-thousand years. Even if individuals forget, the community remembers. And that memory lingers even when more palpable symbols of achievement in this world are gone.

The teaching of Judaism is that while the world changes, there is permanence. There is continuity in memory, in connections between people, in God. Although much in this world might be lost, it is reclaimed through recollection.

Part of the understanding to be wrested from any tragedy is that everything has not been rendered meaningless by loss. Even something so fixed and durable as a home is not ultimately what lasts. The abidingness of life is found in others, and in God. This Yizkor there will be much to mourn for many who have lived through this terrible tragedy. Nothing can obliterate the horrible pain, the sense of life's work having been swept away, the helplessness and violation.

Yet Judaism adjures us to remember that which lasts. It is in our power to ensure that no storm can blow away memory, and no floods wash away faith.

Those of us who only watched the devastation must remember the vivid images of lives upended, dreams shattered, homes and hearts swept up in the storm. Those who lived through it have the far harder task of clinging to what does last: to memory, to hope, to each other, to God. From the rest of us, in the immemorial words of our tradition, chazak, chazak v'titchazek: Stay strong, and may you be strengthened.

the new orleans joke

For YEARS I've heard my friends from Louisiana joke about how the bottom 1/2 of the state would be destroyed by a hurricane because of its dysfunctional system. What's atrocious is the GOVERNMENT had the same theory, had a plan to fix it and the money to prepare the city

and Bush took it away to pay for his war in Iraq

Added note from Governor's press conference right now: "If people had jobs, they don't have jobs anymore. They don't have homes anymore"


SPIEGEL ONLINE - August 31, 2005, 11:22 PMURL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,372455,00.html

Former Clinton Advisor "No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"
By Sidney Blumenthal

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature. A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations.

In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation. "The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge.

In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions.

At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes. In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.