pzb and jc(Photo of Poppy Z. Brite and Juan Carlos by me, from 2001)

One of my oldest and dearest friends is New Orleans author Poppy Z. Brite. We met when she lived in Athens, way back in 1991, on the eve of the release of her first novel, Lost Souls.

She moved to New Orleans in 1993 and I followed her down there in 1995. We were roommates for one certifiably insane summer before I came limping back to Athens, suffering from, uh, “exhaustion and dehydration”.

Poppy has refused to leave New Orleans in spite of the massive personal and financial losses she suffered in the wake of the failure of the federal levees during Hurricane Katrina. These days, she and her husband have bought a house in a different neighborhood and are struggling, still, to come to terms with the state of their city (and by extension, their lives) in the wake of the worst civil engineering disaster in US history.

In 2006, Poppy published an amazing post on her blog called “Not OK”, listing the myriad ways in which New Orleans was still struggling to get back on its feet more than six months after the storm. Today, on the second anniversary of Katrina’s landfall and the flooding of New Orleans, she has followed up her original post with an entry called, “We Are Still Not OK” which lists the thirteen points laid out in the first post with follow-ups detailing where the situation stands today.

Some highlights:

1. Most of the city is still officially uninhabitable. We and most other current New Orleanians live in what is sometimes known as The Sliver By The River, a section between the Mississippi River and St. Charles Avenue that didn’t flood, as well as in the French Quarter and part of the Faubourg Marigny. In the “uninhabitable sections,” there are hundreds of people living clandestinely in their homes with no lights, power, or (in many cases) drinkable water. They cannot afford generators or the gasoline it takes to run them, or if they have generators, they can only run them for part of the day. They cook on camp stoves and light their homes with candles or oil lamps at night.

Power and water have been restored to every part of the city, which is certainly not to say that every individual home has these services. There are still people living in darkened, waterless shells of homes. Since moving out of the relatively sheltered Sliver by the River and into the very different world of Central City, I’ve learned that there are also people living without these services (particularly water) as a matter of course, not because the services are unavailable but because the people have fallen too far behind on their bills and cannot afford the charge to have them turned back on. I’ve spread the word that neighborhood folks are welcome to take water from our outside tap, and often hear/see them trudging away with containers in their hands.

(…)

6. There is hardly any medical care in the city. As far as I know, only two hospitals and an emergency facility in the convention center are currently operating. Emergency room patients, even those having serious symptoms like chest pains, routinely wait eight hours or more to be seen by a doctor. We have, I believe, 600 hospital beds in a city whose population is approaching (and may have surpassed) 250,000.

More hospitals and private doctors are open for business, but the state of our medical care is still pretty dire. In a city where almost everybody is going crazy in one way or another, there’s virtually no help for mental patients, who are usually either held in emergency rooms or jailed. State Attorney General Charles Foti failed in his attempted case against Memorial Medical Center doctors and other medical personnel who stayed through the storm and were accused of euthanizing elderly patients, but Foti’s idiocy will probably drive medical personnel out of the city at a time when we desperately need them, and will certainly ensure that fewer will stay through the next storm.

(…)

13. A large percentage — I’ve heard figures ranging from 60 to 75% — of current New Orleanians are on some form of antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug. The lines at the pharmacy windows have become a running joke. When a visiting “expert” gave a Power Point presentation on post-traumatic stress disorder recently, the entire audience dissolved into hysterical laughter.

Every month or so we get a news story about how many of us are on antidepressants, how many are abusing drugs or alcohol, etc. The numbers are frighteningly high. The latest buzzword is that we’re not having PTSD, but “continuing stress disorder” from living among wreckage and other constant reminders of what happened, still not having levees we can depend on, the increasingly out-of-control cost of living, etc. Many of my close friends are depressed, some so severely that I fear for their lives. (I expect they sometimes fear for mine too, though I think that if I were going to do anything like that, I would have done it last winter.) I myself am still taking two anti-anxiety drugs, Klonopin and Xanax. I’ve tried to get off them a few times, but since I started having severe panic attacks this spring, I feel more dependent on them than ever.

Go read the whole post, please, and remember that the destruction of New Orleans was NOT a “natural disaster”. A toxic cocktail of incompetence and corruption meant that the Army Corps of Engineers built shitty levees that weren’t supposed to collapse, but did. Hurricane Katrina was an Act of God, but the flooding and abandonment of New Orleans was most assuredly an Act of Man, a crime against humanity that goes on to this day.

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