Uhhhhh. I wonder if the JCC offers this class.
Feliz Navidad, folks! Off to dinner, Fahy’s, a party, Fahy’s, possibly a bonfire (aren’t there other ways to dispose of Christmas trees?), possibly a gumbo-pot-drop, back to Fahy’s … you get the picture.
If you’re out and about tonight, please travel by cab. Safety first, or at least, third.
Who am I, who has never lived in one of these buildings, with the stigma and hopelessness that have come to be associated with them, to have a say? Who am I, with my own aforementioned and tenuous notions of home, to say don’t come back? Who am I, with my own priveleged experiences of home, to invite people back to buildings I wouldn’t inhabit, to deplorable amenities and to the first line of the New Orleans trenches? According to some, the classifieds contain many job openings for janitors, dishwashers, valet parkers, sweepers, bank tellers (but not really, some of my friends in the service industry say). Who am I to say come back to these jobs, with no hope for upward mobility and, while you’re at it, work three of them at $7-10 per hour each, while your children go unattended? Who am I to welcome you back to being the wage slaves of the Copelands, Brennans and Impastatos of the city? Who am I to ask to have your kids in better school systems re-enter this mess so they, too, can grow up to be janitors, dishwashers, valet parkers, sweepers and bank tellers, if they somehow manage to avoid lives of crime and despondency? Yet, who am I to say, no Ms. Rosie, you may not come back home to the only world and culture you’ve ever known because this city cannot take care of you who were once a contributor but are no more? Who am I to say you’re better off or not in Houston, Atlanta, Baton Rouge or New York City, anywhere but here?
More importantly, are any of my aforementioned thoughts even the damned point?
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Out of sorts and out of town for the last ten days, I am now playing catch-up with New Orleans news, especially blogger encounters of the tasering/pepper spraying/riots kind that took place outside City Hall on the 20th.
Meanwhile, Oyster keeps track of exactly how many public housing units are available in New Orleans today:
Why didn’t activists press hard on this dubious, evolving HUD number upon which the T-P based so much of its reporting and editorial opinion? Wasn’t this a politically exploitable “soft spot”? If the T-P was forced to retract its false subheading about the “fact” that “hundreds” of units were available “right now”, and if HUD was shown to be lying about the 154 unit number– a distinct possibility in my view– wouldn’t the activists be in a very strong position to demand a second opinion on, say, HUD’s rehab vs. redevelop cost numbers?
Activists, like some bloggers, possess a certain usefulness; they call attention to issues that would normally be twisted or swept under the rug by the government-media complex. Unfortunately, what has formed here are two wrong sides to this story and, since most people cannot think beyond a pre-packaged and two-sided morsel, this has come down to a battle between Theatri-vists/neo-Yippies and Vitter/Head/pro-demolitionists. The saddest aspect of it all is that none of them would live in the housing units they are fighting over.
Arguments like those of Karen‘s, Cliff‘s and Breez‘s which address the situation of the people who would live, have lived, will continue to live in such housing is lost. Life has been good to me so far; heaven forbid that I ever experience such a situation where wealthier and more secure people address me as a castoff or in the third person, while arguing amongst themselves over my fate.
Again, I know people extremely well who’ve had to start over from bankruptcy, prison, divorce, family disownment and single motherhood, who scrounged food out of trashcans and hitchhiked cross-country to avoid getting on government assistance. Do we want our fellow citizens to live like that? Conversely, would we prefer them living in public housing permanently? What’s the right formula?
The elephant in the living room: Race. Black people. Karen talks of it as deconcentrating large populations of poor black people, ostensibly to help them merge in with Normal, Productive Members Of Society like you and me. The question is How? How have black people, or any grouped minority, historically come out of the ghetto and where do they go? Cliff says it took his grandmother 19 years to exit and to what? What did she and her fellow “escapees” work their way into? What concrete avenues do we as a people set up to help those wanting to get out? One idea is scattering low-income and affordable housing throughout the city but this is normally met with NIMBY backlash. Where can these folks get on Assimilation Express if that’s what the nation really wants?
The next person who says “Mixed-income housing has worked in Atlanta, it can work here, too” is going to be bitch-slapped. Have you experienced the dysfunction of this city? Where do folks go once the projects are torn down but promised housing remains undelivered? D and I recently listened to a Bob Edwards Show special on homelessness in America and were stunned by the statistics:
… the fastest growing homeless population in the United States is homeless families. Increasingly, single parents are unable to provide basic necessities for their children – food, shelter, clothing, and medicine. Forty percent of homeless Americans are homeless families with children. In New York the number of homeless families is at an all time high, with 9,500 in shelters. In Washington, DC the only emergency shelter for homeless families has been closed, causing hundreds of families to be put on a waiting list for housing.
Such problems in DC and New York, cities that hold a lot more political and economic sway than New Orleans does. This is America today, folks, coming soon to your very own sterile town. Do you now see why this cannot be a rhetoric-filled, false dichotomy between Government-Subsidized Housing Good vs. Government-Subsidized Housing Bad? Projects aren’t the answer, homelessness is also anathema, so we’d better start discussing and doing in constructive terms. Now I ask: is that possible here?
Like I’ve said before, if HUD/HANO, Senator Vitter, Stacy Head and her City Council and the cast of government thousands could find their way out of a wet paper sack, I’d change this blog’s day count to something utopian actually taking place in this town. If recovery/rebuilding for everyone were really on the minds of the architects of New New Orleans, I’d honestly plead, “Come back, everyone!” If people were to realize that government is the problem, not the solution, there would be no issue here. But, this city backed by this government just cannot, will not do it. With this in mind, do I want the poorer of my fellow citizens to become embroiled in this mess again? I’m not so sure.
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These are my vertiginous thoughts about this potential-ridden city on December 31, 2007, 2.35 years after the storm/flood. My sincere hope is that 2008 brings nicer things to New Orleans. She sure could use them.
15,000 Hawaii football fans swarm New Orleans
Almost ran over a couple yesterday on the way to the Bywater. After a two-week interlude of not driving while in Europe, followed by the car wreck and another hiatus from the whole driving thing, D let me borrow his baby, his precious almost-vintage Cadillac, to meet with fellow KduVers at the den yesterday. Although friends, D and I are going to the Somestates Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day, I’d completely forgotten that the madding crowd was once again upon our fair Quarter and drove right into the stupid-surreal experience.
Pulling up to the intersection of N. Peters and Bienville, I noticed a little old white lady clutch her purse tighter who later peered into the passenger’s side of the Caddy, probably wondering what a young brown woman with bright red lipstick was doing driving the pimp-mobile. I wanted to roll down the window and say, “Ma’am, this is 2007, allow me to point out the man from Georgia driving the gigantic Hummer to my left while yelling loudly into his cellphone. It’s them tourists running over you with their big cars that you should be terrified about, not a local in a powder-blue Cadillac.” Grabbing the huge steering wheel, I drove on, however, not wanting the old lady to keel over from a heart attack as she thought, “My god, these New Orleanians, they can talk.” What would that say about our hospitality?
Decatur St. in front of Jackson Square was, in no uncertain terms, a zoo. I wondered if Adrastos had his store open and, if so, what dumb questions was he entertaining? Were visiting shoppers already urinating on every stationary item like he predicted they would? Back to my own personal nightmare: what is up with half-naked, pot-bellied old men jogging their way or young women behind giant sunglasses walking their little drop-kick dogs between stumbling tourists and inch-an-hour traffic? Right across from Cafe du Monde, a Hawaiian couple decided to run in front of the Caddy because they … just … had … to … get … a picture of whatever it was on the other side. You – scrawny Asian-American. Me – just-driving-again lady in a giant luxury vehicle produced by General Motors back in 1990, back when the Big Three in Detroit were still respected, no raw material was spared in automobile creation and cars were but extensions of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. What, people, do you not understand about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and … momentum? Luckily, I’d already divined their intentions half a block in advance and slowed down to let them cross. Tourist Paste avoided.
What I haven’t told you about the Smooth Ride so far is its boat horn, which makes all the cats in the neighborhood and me jump in unison each time D employs it in our presence. This drive gave me a chance to use it when a woman stopped in the middle of the street across from the French Market to mix her drink and pick up her stirrer off the ground. HONK! followed by a startled scurry across the street. Rule 1: The street is not the sidewalk. Rule 2: Unless it is a purse or a much-loved child, if you drop anything on the streets of the French Quarter, do not attempt to reclaim it. Nice shoes have been sacrificed to the garbage gods after a long day’s night in The Big Unsanitary.
Speaking of which, does the fir tree adjacent to the Joan of Arc statue look like it was tp-ed with silver-spraypainted toilet paper to you, or is that someone’s idea of trimming?
As for the Sugar Bowl itself, I’m of two minds about going. Friends were decent enough to give us free tickets, albeit in the Georgia section (M graduated from Georgia while the rest of us are mere taggers-on). Allstate has some nerve picking up the naming rights for this game and the BCS national championship, after giving the people of New Orleans the royal shaft (and overbilling the National Flood Insurance Program) following the hurricane and federal flood. Channel 6 played footage from yesterday’s pre-game parade, replete with local brass bands and Indians. Sure, it’s a way for local entertainers to make a living, but how many of those folks were stripped off home and hearth thanks to Allstate? How many parades do they have to work and for how long before they can pay off those new hiked-up rates? As I think too much on it, I’ve decided to wear my usual winter black, silently root for the Rainbow Warriors (to avoid taunts and punches from drunken Dawgs fans) and then go home.
The Superdome should be fun – D and I haven’t been in it since the post-Flood reparations. I’ll have the trusty camera(s) with me, so await photographic evidence. Two weeks later, it’s back to the Frozen Tundra we go for the NFC divisional playoff game. Travel. Travel and football. Travel, football and Carnival season. Travel, football, Carnival season and Krewe du Vieux parade on January 19th. Travel, football, Carnival season, Krewe du Vieux parade on January 19th and Mardi Gras on February 5th. These are the things insanity is made of.
This morning, the price of oil was up because of Bhutto’s assassination and potential super-duper political unrest in Pakistan. Now, it’s due to an inventory decline. Later this afternoon, a butterfly fluttering its wings the wrong way will shoot it up to $100/barrel.
… and placating the leaders of the ones we should go after.
Benazir Bhutto, The First Woman Prime Minister Of An Islamic Nation, Assassinated
The sarcastic, albeit true, party line for why Pakistan was not taken to task by the Americans is that it has no oil. In that case, why didn’t we go after Saudi Arabia, the other lead exporter of Islamic extremism? Incidents like Bhutto’s assassination and the recent attacks in Algeria scare the living daylights out of me. My brain, without much prompting, begins to visualize the next subway bombing or 9/11 in the western world.
Alarmist thinking? Check out the results of this latest poll of American popularity abroad.
… According to surveys conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts, between 2002 and 2007 favorable views of the United States fell from 60 to 30 percent in Germany, from 61 to 29 in Indonesia and from 30 to 9 in Turkey (though in Pakistan the figure rose from 10 percent to 15).
Despite a 5% approval increase on the part of the Pakistanis, the article also mentions that a whopping 72% of Pakistan’s citizens dislike America.
Add to this the following outcome of Bertelsmann Foundation’s international opinion poll: China and Russia have risen in stature, while America’s star wanes [full report].
Regardless of the error bars or personal biases within these polls, perception is nine-tenths of the problem. Therefore, I ask: At what cost do we “fight terrorism?” Making more terrorists. Oil at what cost? American lives. The abuse of our treasury and international status to what end? Shame, ridicule and the poorhouse. Whatever happened to properly-applied diplomacy?
The current solution of the anti-terror governments of this planet (mostly us) does not work. Meanwhile, our nation and its status falters abroad. It’s way past time to rethink our methods of dealing with not only Islamic extremism but also the newly-fomented overall Arab hatred of us. Aptly-placed diplomacy, for starters. To those of you who think diplomacy is for treehuggers and peaceniks, what I mean is not hugs all around. Diplomacy is negotiating peaceful solutions and offering economic (minus arms and tanks), social and educational initiatives to subdue and provide constructive alternatives to belligerent elements, while tightening the grip on the family jewels of nations like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan. Education, jobs, choices — these are the things that build bridges, understanding and amity and take people away from lives of terror-mongering.
Let them know we care but also mean business, instead of farting around in Iraq, killing Iraqis and Americans and watching as more wasps emerge from their invisible nests.
On first hearing of Bhutto’s death this morning, I thought, “Oh great, another martyr for the cause of the Troop Surge in the name of continuing to fight terror. Except that this time they’ll send more troops to Afghanistan or Antartica while making kissy-kissy with the Pakistani government as that nation goes to hell in a handbasket.”
Look, Time already says I’m partly right.
“She was let down by those in Washington who think that sucking up to bad governments around the world is their best policy option” … There will be many tense days ahead for the Musharraf government as it deals with this political crisis. And that’s good news for terrorism.
I’m really sorry, Pakistan, and hope you make it out of this turbulent time. I hope we make it in the long run, too.
A moment is forever when your vehicle needs gas. The same vehicle being T-boned, spun, flipped and spun again in a busy downtown New Orleans intersection happens in a flash. Nothing that happened registers until your cellphone falls out of your purse and onto your head, smacking you into alertness. D credits seat belts, airbags, crumple zones and all of that hard work engineers put into modern vehicles, but I cannot shake a suspicion that someone wanted me to walk away from the crash of exactly one week ago without a single scratch on me. Lucky me. Lucky other driver.
Three hours go by too quickly when cooing at, fawning over and playing with your adorable twin godsons and plying them with some of their first Christmas presents ever. Three hours is a lifetime when staring in disbelief at the Packers punch themselves in their frozen hoo-has and repeatedly this past weekend. You have to watch all the way to the end, though. Them’s the rules, which only makes every tick of the game clock that much more agonizing.
Plane travel, especially around the holidays, defies all rules of temporal equivalence. Bottom line: I’m glad to be home and not in an airport or an airplane any longer. Speaking of airplanes, there was more onboard drama during this last trip. Something about delays brings out the strangest aspects of people.
Time is like a rubberband. I just want to know who keeps jacking with the Caesium atom when no one is looking.
Off to Wisconsin for Christmas. Back on the 26th. Wouldn’t a month or two with no travel or other excitement be nice?
Happy Hannukwanzasolstimas, all!
… while humans fight over evolution vs. creationism. I’m not surprised at the results of this study given the requirements for American college entry these days (and how unintuitive our youth have become when it comes to numerical judgments, thanks to the calculator and computer). Were the Duke college students “rewarded” for getting right answers like the monkeys were? What did they get? Bud Lite? A kegstand?
PhysOrg.com: Monkeys Perform Arithmetic As Well As College Students
“If the correct sum was 11 and the box with the incorrect number held 12 dots, both monkeys and the college students took longer to answer and had more errors. We call this the ratio effect,” explained Cantlon. “What’s remarkable is that both species suffered from the ratio effect at virtually the same rate.”
NFL Playoff Bracket (Hey, Saints fans, it was the Bears vs. the Vikings, did you expect me to root for either of them?)
Guess where I’ll be for the NFC divisional playoff game? In Green Bay at Lambeau Field, sitting either right behind the Packers bench (proximity) or higher up by an end zone (better view of the field).
Of course, I’m thrilled that Brett Favre is Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman Of The Year! D and I teared up while reading the article. Brett and his family have gone through a hell of a lot to get to today.
On Packer fans:
“People here treat us like family, and I think they care for us like family,” says Deanna. “Because of everything we’ve been through, they don’t see Brett as untouchable or as some kind of superhero. And they’ve been through it with us. The fans here feel close to Brett because they’ve all had their own similar struggles. Nothing against Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, but I’m not sure their fans relate to them in the same way.”
On the Packers – Gulf Coast reconstruction connection:
… The Door County Gulf Coast Relief Fund was also born in the wake of Katrina … since then, the relief efforts have continued to grow in scope; Green Bay volunteers — electricians, roofers and other skilled tradesmen in strong demand on the Gulf Coast — have made more than 20 trips to Kiln to help rebuild damaged homes.
Folks didn’t stop writing or emailing me about New Orleans while I was gone. Damn them!
Blogger buddy, Sriram Gopal, penned a piece for DCist on a recent benefit party held for Al “Carnival Time” Johnson. I will never forget Al singing his favorites at 2005′s Krewe du Vieux ball.
Mike Danahey, winner at Bingo!, writes about ex-Chicagoan Rudy Vorkapic and his experiment in media known as The New Orleans Levee.
Friend and fellow Wisconsin alum, Jenny, takes issue with this Wisconsin Alumni Association article on the lessons learned from Katrina, the flood and the fallout. She retorts, “I don’t think this is correct – the statistics from the St. Gabriel morgue showed that of those who perished in the storm, 51% were black, 41% white, as opposed to a 61% black, 36% white general population in the city. Plus, this doesn’t take into account victims in the out-lying parishes or in Mississippi – the vast majority of whom were white. This article incenses me. Yes, natural disasters are a great reason to focus on the poor and the black, but failing to mention anything else creates the illusion that those were the only people injured! Argh! And, this is being taught to students and distributed to alumni???”
Aren’t the elderly, whether black or white, really the ongoing victims of this catastrophe? Can you imagine getting to the end of your days and going through something like this? A life is tough enough.