3499was gonna put in LJ, but it's too melodramatic

Sep. 5, 2005

 

 

I have a chair in the living room that I just throw stuff into. Every
once in a while, I go and clean out the chair, put all the magazines,
junk mail, newspapers, toys, and what-have-you back where they belong.

Today I cleaned out my chair and found The Lonely Planet guide to New
Orleans. It hit me like a fist. I just made this...noise. I guess it
was a sob. I dunno. Just all the hurt inside coming out in a bubble,
and the next thing I know I was crying while my Sweetie held me.

I miss my home. I am so angry and hurt and helpless feeling...I sent
money, I gave raffle stuff to the otter chaos gathering. But...it just
isn't enough, it's not going to bring it back. It's gone.
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http://www.livejournal.com/users/fugaciouslover/

Mon, Sep. 5th, 2005, 10:30 pm
From National Geographic Magazine

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the
Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved
as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent
homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV
"storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing
surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in
this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the
city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a
million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained,
however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those
die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead,
pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept
to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then
spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea
level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A
liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over
the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned
porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and
strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse.
As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people
climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by
sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood
later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be
rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big
Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people
were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster
in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday
scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency
lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire
threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California
or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer
opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers
is too great.



Yo, for those of you who are wondering about that last
paragraph-and-a-half, it's because it hadn't happened when National
Geographic published this eerily prescient article in October of 2004.

And the only reason I posted this is to remind you all that when we
were told that no one could have anticipated the breach of those
levees, it's one of the administration's long history of telling us
half truths.

True, no one really anticipated the breach of the levees. But the
flooding that caused the disaster--that's been on the worst-case
scenario of anyone who's been paying attention for more than a decade.
That was anticipated and warned against many, many times by many, many
people over the last decade or so. Some of the people who have been
warning against it are the very people that the government employs to
think about such things.

Those gorramn bastiges.

I hurt. I hurt. And I'm afraid. I'm living in interesting times, and
I'm experienced enough to have an idea what that means.