Whatever's left over...
Posted on 12/10/2005 3:30:51 PM PST by Crackingham
With jazz music, prayer and offerings to the gods, hundreds of Hurricane Katrina survivors on Saturday demanded the government move faster to rebuild the city and provide evacuees with more disaster assistance. Shouting "We're Back," protesters said they feared the city's poor would be shut out of reconstruction after being dispersed far across the United States since the storm. City officials estimate more than 300,000 New Orleans residents have yet to return since Katrina flooded the city, reducing entire neighborhoods to a rubble-strewn wasteland.
In one of the largest rallies in New Orleans since the hurricane, survivors marched to City Hall from Congo Square, a centuries-old meeting place where African slaves once gathered to trade, play music and dance. African drummers and a brass band dubbed the "Soul Rebels" set the carnival-like tone, while a tribal priest made an offering of rum and watermelon.
"I lived in my house for 45 years -- my mother died and left it to me," said Gloria Brown, 70, an evacuee living in San Francisco. "I swam seven blocks in filthy water with my dog Queenie to survive. I want to come back but I can't pay for it."
The federal government is providing varying amounts of assistance to evacuees to cover temporary housing and living expenses. But some evacuees said they have not yet received any money.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has held meetings with evacuees living in places like Alabama or Mississippi to gather their ideas about how to rebuild the city. City and state officials have yet to determine how to rebuild a faulty levee system that created the flooding, a key decision for insurers and lenders financing the reconstruction. Some hurricane evacuees said there should be less talk and more action.
"Right now they're treating us like refugees," said Mervin Lucas. "They're worried about health in Afghanistan, the cold in Pakistan. They're giving folks in Iraq better things than they're giving us."
Rally organizers accused the city of discriminating against black residents by moving slowly on rebuilding, particularly in low-income areas that were hardest hit, after failing to rescue them quickly in the days following the storm.
"It's no secret the rich white folks uptown don't want us back," said Malcolm Suber, a protest leader with the grass-roots People's Hurricane Relief Fund. "This government left us to starve and to die."
These are the same people who allowed a few thousand of their own fully operable cars to be drowned instead of using those cars to evacuate when they could have. Now they want to sponge off the rest of us. Disgusting.
It's sort of like trying to decise which is worse, AIDS or Leprosy.
I didn't need any help in understanding that.
That's their "Declaration of the People." If so, I want in. Just how much is the gubmint giving away to middle class working Joe's like myself?
"It's sort of like trying to decise which is worse, AIDS or Leprosy."
IIRC, Leprosy is cureable, now. So that doesn't exactly fit, but it is the same sort of thing... Maybe Ebola?
Whatever's left over...
"Well, bless your heart"
I'm southern enough to know that this line, coming from a southern woman, is equivalent to chambering a round in your shotgun.......
Heellllooooo. It's not the governments job to rebuild the city. And use your own money to move, like we did. Get a grip.
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