Posted on 09/15/2005 6:31:25 PM PDT by Army Air Corps
LUBBOCK — Desmond Bemiss stood at the open doors of the yellow school bus and watched three of his children get aboard for their first day of school.
Bemiss had been up since 5 a.m. His 5-year-old daughter, Dachannice, woke him as she often did in their home on Urseline Street in New Orleans. None of the Bemisses, 20 of them in all, had slept much the night before or the nights before that. Even when some of the lights were turned out, the conversations, televisions and boom boxes made the old Air Force hangar roar again into the early mornings.
This was no place for children, Bemiss knew, and it made him even more impatient to leave. Never had Bemiss and his family been so well cared for. No one was more genuinely appreciative than he. But how long, he wondered, could it or should it last?
(Excerpt) Read more at statesman.com ...
You may find this interesting.
"It's starting to be that people ought to be getting on with their lives," Bemiss said. "If people make this last any longer, they don't want nothin' in life."
And he strategized from the beginning to keep his family of 20 together? Sounds like a potential Lubbock family-values, bootstraps Republican to me.....
"This is the kind of community we have here," said state Rep. Carl Isett, R-Lubbock. "This is the way it has always been here." It is the kind of community the evacuees have never seen: overwhelmingly white and proud of its ability to raise up its oil roughnecks and their families into the solid, taxpaying middle class.
Isett is right. It's just the way it is on the Llano Estacado. Let's offer to let Natalie Maines call herself a New Orleans native in exchange for Bemiss.
This just about made me cry. I hope this family finds their future to be happy and bright.
Yeah....that part made a big lump in my throat too.
"Let's offer to let Natalie Maines call herself a New Orleans native in exchange for Bemiss."
Hasn't New Orleans suffered enough? I might be willing to inflict Natalie "The Ditz" Maines on Kim Jong Il or Fidel...
Hub City Ping
Great article...especially from the Statesman. Thanks for the post and ping!
This is some article. Two dozen companies turned away from the job fair due to lack of space?!! What an outpouring of help. Folks are carping on the President's speech live thread about the government aid, but there is so much coming from the public sector, people just need to cool it for a bit and see how it all shakes out.
I heard a similar story last night on the BBC. A decent family getting a new start in San Antonio. They also plan to stay.
Your heart goes out to these people who've lost everything, but I think many of them are having their eyes opened to the way it's possible to live in America.
To you Texans, everything I'm reading/hearing/seeing on TV makes me admire you guys more and more. What a state! What people!
Thanks.
Our folks value good honest citizens who work hard and play hard. Also, as of 1 September 2005, you can have a loaded pistol in your vehicle...
I too was shocked not to find the usual derogatory comments about Lubbock that one often reads in the Austin-American Daily Worker.
Those live TV event threads are only fun when one is drinking a great deal. Otherwise, there's too much carping such as you mention.
Ok that did it - I'm crying......... the part about never being around white people who looked him in the eye did me in.
My town, Sioux Falls, is a city of somewhere close to 200,000. We had places for up to 500 refugees, but none came. No one wanted to come here. I'm not sure if I'm elated or insulted.
I sure hope some can use this as a springboard for new opportunities. I have been wondering about the effect of divorced people with kids who used to live in the same area as the non custodial parent. I moved 2500 miles to be near my son. It was costly in more ways than just money. It had to be done but it meant starting all over with eight years of night shift. It has been 12 years now and my kid just bought a house a block away. Happy ending in my case. I hope for them too.
The child saying he/she would never forget the classmates' names did me in.
Yeah, wassup w/that?
One of my sisters went to college in North Carolina. When I rant that it looks like these people haven't done anything with their lives, she tells me that being poor and black in the south is different from being poor and black up north. From what I've seen of these NOLA folks, she might be right. It is hard to believe these people are living in 2005.
What the heck was going on in NOLA???
I wonder how many will never return to NO? My hubby used to live in Lubbock before coming to California about 17 years ago. He liked it there. Wish this family the best.
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