(image: mattewalt/flickr)

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast in August and September of 2005, upending the lives of 1.5 million people and putting Black folks’ lack of political and social power front and center for all the world to see.

The storms magnified racial disparities in the U.S., and no place demonstrated this more clearly than New Orleans, where 80% of the city was submerged after Katrina. Out of this devastation, ColorOfChange was born.

When Katrina touched land on August 29, more than a third of all Black New Orleanians were living in poverty. As we know well from the televised accounts, these impoverished and largely Black neighborhoods bore the brunt of the disaster. And the lack of access to resources was one major reason why folks couldn’t simply leave when they got news of the coming storm.

Adding insult to injury, the federal government took its time responding once the levees and flood walls broke. We were heartbroken by the apathy of the Bush Administration and the failures of corporate media, some members of which depicted African-American survivors as “looters” and “refugees.” These characterizations had real consequences, as a groundbreaking investigation in The Nation magazine would later reveal.

Within a month of the organization’s launch, ColorOfChange had attracted its first 10,000 members. People who received our earliest emails in the aftermath of the storm passed them along to their family and riends, who in turn joined the cause. Following Katrina and Rita, our members raised their voices in support of Gulf Coast housing rights, voting rights, and access to an intact safety net. Our campaigns represented everyday folks’ ability to amplify the demands of those affected by the storms. They represented the power of Black Americans and our allies to respond to the costliest national disaster in American history by building a network that could respond quickly and forcefully.

For victims of the storms, the battle for dignity and justice is far from over. As recently as last month, FEMA told Hurricane survivors to repay federal funds they’d received as part of the relief effort. And ColorOfChange has supported the local fight against the expansion of the Orleans Parish Prison, the same jail where inmates were left in their cells to fend for themselves as the floodwaters rose in the days following the storm.

So why point to Katrina during Black History Month?

Events that took place during and after the storms continue to shape thousands of lives. New Orleans in particular is struggling to rebuild in the face of sobering statistics. Just one example: 65% of Black children under the age of 5 in the city live in poverty. We’ve seen victories in the region, but progress has been slow.ColorOfChange remains committed to supporting Gulf Coast residents as they work to rebuild their communities. That’s Black history in the making.

Laurel & Hardy, Babes in Toyland, 1934

We humans find ourselves in an awkward – perhaps fatally awkward – circumstance. We seem unable to safely and morally manage the technologies and systems we are clever enough to invent.

From Bhopal to Chernobyl, from Three Mile Island to the Gulf Oil spill, from New Orleans levee failures to the Japan nuclear crisis, we have failed time and again to adequately prevent or prepare for man-made disasters or respond adequately when they occur. I could add other items to the list:  DDT, pharmaceuticals that kill, and financial systems that destroy global economies.

We are babes in a dangerous toyland, convinced of our own Promethean powers only to be undone when our magical machines explode.  We are like Grumio, Toymaker assistant in the 1961 film version of Babes in Toyland, driving our toymaking machines to the breaking point.

Human invention is not the problem. The problem is political. We lack the collective will to safely manage our systems and inventions. In the case of the grandest failure of them all – the global climate crisis – we are going to need all of our creativity and inventiveness if we are to avoid catastrophe. And we are going to need to apply that creativity as much to political problem-solving as to technological innovation.

It’s fair to say that among other differences liberals and conservatives divide along this fault line. Conservatives believe the systems are better off without human intervention, denying that they were created by our intervention in the first place! In their faith, the Free Market is Divine Providence and fallen humans should keep their sinful hands off the levers. Liberals believe we need to be more deeply engaged in the operation and management of systems we invent.

The failures noted above, of course, are not limited to capitalist democracies all of a kind. There are profound differences among governing systems in the former Soviet Union, India, Japan, and the United States. Heavy-handed centralized state management is as inadequate as our (theoretical) laissez-faire political economies.

The problem is complex and much harder to confront than it is to glibly describe. Social and political organizations are not machines. They are emotion-laden collections of diverse people and interests. We are connected to one another by fuzzy attractions and repulsions. There’s no Intel chip at our center.

I won’t digress about the ideological baggage of much science and technology, but it seems obvious that human political thought and action is so freighted with bias, self-interest and ideology that some different rules apply. The “psychohistory” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series – the reduction of human behavior to mathematical formulae – is science fiction.

Still, much of our political thinking follows lines similar to Asimov’s. This is ideology, whether it’s the myth of perpetual progress in classical liberal thinking, historical inevitability in Marxist thinking, or the belief in the divine status of a free market in conservative thinking. All assume their answers from the outset. All believe human behavior is predictable. All rely on a very shaky determinism.

We are not likely to find workable solutions in the so-called “Third Way,” that is nothing more than brainless compromise between inadequate approaches.

It does not mean that creative answers cannot or will not be found. As a start, we should collectively decide to apply our creativity and inventiveness to our all-too-human circumstance. Egalitarian or popular democracy is a profoundly creative approach to political, social and economic organization. We can be proud of it and other political inventions, even if we have failed to fully adopt them.

It’s not beyond or ability to safely and morally manage our systems and inventions. So far, it has been beyond our will. That, we can change.

Upon further review, Brownie was *not* doing a heckuva job. (photo by smiteme)

Well, well, well — look what The Decider says in his ghost writer’s new book.

In the book, Bush also recounts the government response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

He calls the response “not only flawed” but “unacceptable,” and describes his own failures in this way: “As the leader of the federal government, I should have recognized the deficiencies sooner and intervened faster. I prided myself on my ability to make crisp and effective decisions. Yet in the days after Katrina, that didn’t happen. The problem was not that I made the wrong decisions. It was that I took too long to decide.”

Unacceptable deficiencies? I thought the federal government’s response was just dandy.

“With all due respect, the federal government’s responsibilities were met under Katrina which were to provide the immediate assistance, to pluck people off of the roofs,” Rove said.

It was all those Louisiana libruls’ fault, right?

Most of the death and mayhem was entirely preventable. That’s worth a whole lot of righteous fury. But be angry at the people who failed your city. Their names are Nagin and Ebbert and Blanco, not Bush and Chertoff.

I mean, golly, you’d have to be some kind of drooling half-wit to claim the federal response wasn’t fast enough.

You know, people said that the federal response was slow. Don’t tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed. … 30,000 people were pulled off roofs right after the storm moved through. That’s a pretty quick response.

Oops.

I love stuff like this. Reminds me of the time Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) admitted that pretty much every Republican in Congress thinks Iraq was a mistake.

Serious question: were Republicans and their wingnut cheerleaders right about anything during the Bush/Cheney years?

I did. Actually, I didn’t, but I made time — a couple of hours’ worth.

Then came this morning’s paper:

Suicides among Army and Air National Guard and Reserve troops have spiked this year, and the military is at a loss to explain why.

Sixty-five members of the Guard and Reserve took their own lives during the first six months of 2010, compared with 42 for the same period in 2009. The grim tally is further evidence that suicides continue to plague the military even though it’s stepped up prevention efforts through counseling and mental health awareness programs.

“Suicides among military personnel and veterans are at an epidemic rate, and it’s getting worse,” said Tim Embree, a former Marine who served two tours in Iraq and is now a legislative associate for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group.

Last week, the Army announced that 32 soldiers, including 11 in the Guard and Reserve, took their own lives in June, a rate of one a day and a level not seen since the Vietnam War, according to the military.

Seven of the suicides occurred in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The worrisome trend is reflected in Missouri, where the state Army and Air National Guards have suffered six suicides so far this year, their highest total in a decade. They account for nearly a quarter of the 27 suicides experienced since the Missouri Guard started keeping records in 2001. . .

Explanations are hard to come by. The suicides could have nothing — or everything — to do with the victims’ military service.

“It is the separation from our families, it is the lack of a support structure in our personal lives sometimes, financial challenges, relationships — we know that,” Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a recent talk about the suicide problem to troops in South Korea.

Mullen is exactly right.

Look at Katrina.

Look at the economy.

Look at the BP oil spill. (See Edward Teller’s moving Seminal diary, drawing on his experience in Alaska following the Exxon Valdez spill.)

Desperate times and desperate circumstances lead desperate people to take their own lives. Suicide has many causes, and it seems that each victim has his or her own mix of issues and pressures that led them to kill themselves.  Whatever the specifics of each case are, the two aftereffects of suicide are the same in every case: someone is dead, and the lives of their family and friends and neighbors are twisted with grief and often guilt.

I’ll leave the last word to Shannyn Moore, from her post “Dying Over Oil” (h/t ET):

I know what it is to go from being a fisherman to an oil spill response contractor. I did it in 1989. It feels as dirty as the beaches–like you’ve just made a deal with the devil. The term “Spillionaire” that was thrown around to describe those who made money from the clean up effort doesn’t make up for salt sea spray on your face and the promise of full nets.

Domestic violence, bankruptcy, alcoholism, and collective depression washed up for years following the Exxon Valdez crisis. Twenty one years later, the herring fishery in Cordova is still decimated – genetic lines of fish erased.

This is only the beginning.  Being a fisherman isn’t what you do, it’s who you are – the Gulf of Mexico or Prince William Sound is just geography. The toughest fishermen can’t win; they drown in court. The erosion of identity is invisible compared to the black wake of an environmental oil disaster.  My father told me suicide was a permanent answer to a temporary problem. The BP disaster isn’t temporary though. There is no end in sight.

Take care of each other.

Go read her whole post. Then give your kid a hug, your neighbor a visit, and your friend across the country a call.

Take care of each other, my friends.

(photo: GarySmith70)

* * *

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has lots of helpful information for those who are concerned about this issue, including warning signs of suicide and knowing how to respond to them.

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). It’s free, confidential, and they’ve got a national network of 130 crisis centers to help. If that’s too much to remember, just call 911.

On Frenchmen Street, a two-block circus of music and bars not far from the Quarter, a young street poet bangs away at his spontaneous verse on an old Royal typewriter and recites them for tips. He came to New Orleans from D.C. to work as an ambulance driver. A city hiring freeze left him a lot of time to write. But he’s not panicked. He was, I promise, happy, if in a bluesy kind of way.

I don’t meet many happy people in politics these days. I’m not sure I meet any. In the political arena, panic is everywhere. On the Right, there’s panic about zombie communism. Maybe we should shorten the name of this ultimate straw-bogeyman to zommunism. Anyway, On the Left, there’s panic about undead fascism. Those not panicked about being sold out are panicked about being accused of being sellouts.

One of Austin’s greater slacker rituals used to be the annual North Austin/South Austin tug-o-war called the “Tug of Honor.” A big rope was strung across the Colorado River, and hundreds of beer-drinking partisans lined up on their side of the river, grabbed the rope and tugged. At some point, one side or the other tumbled into the river. Now, we are much too panicked for that sort of revelry. But there’s another point here.

If you’ve ever been on the losing side in a tug-o-war, you know that moment of panic when your team is overpowered, its mutual footing lost. There’s a kind of oh-my-god panic. Somehow, in our current political circumstance, all sides seem to be having such a moment at the same time. The laws of physics hint that that shouldn’t be possible.

I’m not talking about earnest engagement and advocacy, about the moral courage to advance the causes one believes in. Not all political disagreement falls into the panic mode. Still, and don’t panic at this, I think political ideology is usually, if not always, thin and two-dimensional. Our ideological wars beat with dry if frenzied hearts. The point is, some of our humanity is lost when it’s Certainty versus Certainty on the political playing field. We all loose the resources we use to cope with hope and heartache in our everyday lives.

I can almost never remember today the thing that made me panic day before yesterday. That’s not exactly right. It’s better to say I can almost never work myself into a panic today over the thing that panicked me day before yesterday.

Some symptoms of panic:  a fear that all is lost when something is lost; an absolute, religious faith in one’s own judgment; the taking of political setbacks personally; repeated lashing out at those who disagree with us; the certainty that the world (or democracy, or America, or something) will not survive if one’s view does not prevail immediately.

Now, I believe democracy is at risk these days. I think America is fast becoming a kind of purple plutocracy. Corporations are persons, legal entities with no accountability. Corporations are the new humans, above the people and beyond the checks and balances. In this there is great danger. (By the way, if corporations are persons, isn’t it fair to describe Big Insurance as psychopathic? Wikipedia says, “Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct, masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal.” I rest my case.)

But reason to panic doesn’t mean we should panic. Cable news lives to keep us on the edge of panic. What was once NightLine is now Once-A-Minute Line. Everything is urgent, from the Hollywood fall-from-grace (nothing is less urgent than Mel Gibson), to a traffic pileup. America was panicked into war over Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. I rest another case.

I’m with the street poets of New Orleans, and there’s no such thing as a poem written in panic. Or a good law, either.

Evangeline, by George Rodrigue

I was 18, skinny, out of money and in New Orleans for the first time after some Appalachian adventures and a visit to Nixon’s D.C. I faked a cocky walk into a French Quarter piano bar and stayed until closing time when the brunette singer in a sequined costume gown took pity on me. We went to an all-night place to eat. She picked up the tab and sent me gently on my way, and I still don’t know who pays the angels.

I headed out of town on Tulane Avenue under a high, gray light filtered through a very low sky. At the Broad Street red light a man in a rumpled coat and wrinkled trousers stood in the intersection. He swayed on unsteady legs and waved his arms as blood sprayed from his neck. A cop in his car at a gas station on my right saw the same thing I did, looked at me funny, punched his siren and flashed across the intersection. A road sign I hadn’t noticed before slapped me hard with the Dylan verse: “God said, Abraham kill me a son.” The man’s throat was cut near the end of Highway 61.

I’d had a youthful tour of the Museum of America, from John Prine’s Paradise to Washington’s Marble Presidents, from the Encounter With the Compassionate Stranger to the Diorama of Violent Death. I drove on home to Houston, where everyone said I looked gaunt.

I’m spending a lot of time in New Orleans these days. The town, still recovering from the Storm, is bracing for the economic gut punch of the Spill. If I were Pharaoh of New Orleans, I’d let the people go before the Mississippi turns to blood and frogs fill the Superdome.

Already some LeBlancs and Toussaints have escaped to HBO, not the promised land but a virtual home for a spirited, impressionistic filmsong of New Orleans, Treme. Sandra Bullock’s moved to town and adopted a motherless child, and in the French Quarter a guy in a cop costume tosses you a Saints cap and asks for a twenty-dollar food-drive donation. Hat in hand, the role reversed, you give it up for an angel not forgotten.

In New Orleans, the boatmen and carpenters really do sing their varied carols, but it’s no Whitmanesque fantasy. Voices aged in pain and hope rise from the bottom of the Mississippi Delta that Paul Simon, in a song called “Graceland,” sees “shining like a national guitar.” The players are everywhere: on the streets, in the strip joints, in the dance halls, bars, courtyards and restaurants. They’re bowing fiddles, blowing horns and shouting songs as a nation once again turns its lonely eyes away.

Meanwhile, Evangeline’s Acadian descendents got to be praying that the British quit coming. In the very model of a modern ethnic cleansing (called, exquisitely, Le Grande Derangement) the Brits forcibly removed their ancestors from Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s. Many settled in Louisiana, where, 250 years later, British Petroleum’s boiling the descendents in oil.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow turned the tragic Maritime folk-tale of lovers ripped apart by a cruel, colonialist empire into a book-length poem, Evangeline. Hugely popular in the late 19th Century, it was performed at county fairs, festivals and schools. But how do you make poetry from a million barrels of oil and a poisoned Gulf of Mexico?

Best to dream of Evangeline. Miriam Cooper, remembered for her role in Birth of a Nation, played Evangeline in a lost Raoul Walsh 1919 silent movie. The alluring Delores Del Rio took a turn as Evangeline in a 1929 film that features a theme song by Al Jolson and Billy Rose. And she’s the tragic heroine of Robbie Robertson and Emmylou Harris’s haunting song from The Last Waltz.

Evangeline’s long search for love and freedom in the land of exiles and immigrants might make her a more meaningful American symbol to stand in New York Harbor than what we’ve got there. And there’s already an Evangeline statue to work with, in St. Martinville, Louisiana, modeled after and donated by Delores Del Rio.

When I came to New York from New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, I watched some immigrant Andean street musicians stand silent and curious before the Times Square pro-Palistinian protest of the Israeli attack on a ship carrying humanitarian aide to Gaza. Everywhere it’s another Grande Derangement, maybe the Grande Grande Derangement. We need a symbol for exiles and refugees, but I don’t know where to tell them to put it. Maybe Dylan does:

Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose
Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down on Highway 61

Can you think of a better place to make a stand with Evangeline against our global Le Grande Derangement? They’ve cut the throat of the Gulf of Mexico, and it’ll be hell to pay. As Levon Helm and Emmylou sing:

High on the top of Hickory Hill
Standing in the lightning and thunder
Down on the river, the boat was a-sinking
She watched that Queen go under.

If BP, self-policed by Bushie MMSers, can’t cap this disaster (not a spill, it is a spilling: ongoing, ever-blooming, like an undersea volcano of sludgy petroleum) then we may yet see four Valdezes a week from it. For one, or two, or (maybe) three months.

Deepwater Horizon has, yesterday, surpassed Valdez.

Put two oilmen atop our federal government, dear SCOTUS, and this is your/their legacy: dead gulf shores, dead mammals and invertebrates, the poisoning of a seabed that supplies one-third of America’s seafood, dead sea birds. Lives and livelihoods ruined.

I wonder if this catastrophic contingency ever came up during those Cheney Energy Task Force meetings in 2001?

Deepwater Horizon was the most advanced seaborne drilling rig of its kind in use in America, by a captive-regulated industry with no mitigation plan in place for failure, no contingency plans that even approach in total what’s happening every 24 hours now, and little comprehension of the potential for disaster. It was a risky undertaking. While Bushie MMSers were doing cocaine off toaster ovens in their offices and availing themselves of extractor-industry-supplied hookers, no one read or reviewed — or possibly even understood — the great catastrophe being cooked up under their noses. Self-policed, self-regulated, self-reporting: the extraction industries knew what was best for themselves and, by inference, for the rest of us. But, really, they are dangerous to children and other living things.

A reverse-Midas team like Bush/Cheney our world has never before seen:

Bush/Cheney’s economic policies turned the world economy to shit.

Bush/Cheney’s racial policies ignored a drowning New Orleans.

Bush/Cheney’s foreign policy melted down Iraq and, in its new hopey-changey wrapper, may yet melt down Afghanistan.

And now, fifteen months out of office, Bush/Cheney’s energy & environmental regulatory and oversight policies are destroying the coast and, perhaps, the entire Gulf of Mexico. Maybe more, depending on wind, current, and the contamination of the Gulf Stream.

Bush/Cheney is the gift that keeps giving, like herpes or untreated tertiary syphilis. You know something’s wrong, you scratch and scratch — but somehow, you cannot cast out the evil.

Party pooper?

In her most recent column, Jill Lawrence at Politics Daily makes the case that President Obama is not really ignoring his base. In her column defending Obama’s “maverick” behavior, which often goes against direct promises he made to important Democratic constituencies, she quotes Stan Greenberg:

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg said Democrats need opportunities to reach across party lines and show they can govern. That’s how you win independents who hate “the Washington culture, the polarized culture,” he said this week at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. “Karl Rove had a base strategy,” Greenberg added. “And he was very, very consistent, and he destroyed the Republican Party.”

This is complete nonsense and a dangerous rewriting of history. Karl Rove did not destroy the Republican Party. No one political operative, no matter how powerful, brilliant, or stupid, can destroy a political party. As much as it might pain professional political operatives like Greenberg, they are, in the grand scheme of things, just not as important as Greenberg thinks they are.

The elected Republicans who were in power when they caused or failed to respond correctly to our country’s most serious disasters are the people who destroyed the party. It was the war in Iraq, stripped of all pretense of justification and turned into a long, costly, and confusing waste of American blood and treasure, that really hurt the Republican party in 2006. It was the response to Katrina that really helped tarnish George W. Bush’s image. It was several scandals involving elected Republicans that helped Democrats take back the House.

In 2008, the mishandling of the Iraq war was a serious issue. The complete financial meltdown on Bush’s watch played a huge role in helping to elect Obama and other Democrats. Unemployment rose rapidly, and most people lost a lot of money. Fairly or unfairly, the elected Republicans were seen as failing at the task of governing by most of the country–and even large parts of their own base.

The Republican party was not destroyed in 2006 and 2008 by Karl Rove or his appeal-to-the-base political strategy. The GOP was destroyed by Republican leaders’ own failures, their own incompetence, and some plain bad luck. Unless Rove was personally supplying arms to the Iraqi insurgency, single handily spending billions creating the credit default swaps that caused the biggest economic downturn in decades, and had the power of God to summon hurricanes, he bares only a small part of the blame (if any at all) for Republican political loses.

Political strategy, GOTV efforts, voter targeting, etc., play an important role in elections, but they affect things mainly around the edges; not core direction. They can be, at most, the difference between losing 28 seats, and only losing 20.

If Obama and the Democrats in Congress can implement policies that turn the economy around, seriously decrease unemployment, and make the vast majority of Americans feel better off and more financially secure, they will do very well in the next election, regardless of their political strategy. If, on the other hand, the economy tanks and unemployment jumps to 12%, it does not matter if Obama appeals to his base or tries to be a mavericky bipartisan reacher across the aisle. With either political strategy, Democrats will still get hit hard in November. Getting the policy right, so that it most benefits regular voters, is really the best political strategy.

What’s on your mind tonight?

Update: R.I.P. Marva Wright.

Trouble the Water

Tia Lessin, Carl Deal, Producers / Directors

As Hurricane Katrina bears down on New Orleans, Kim Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott, two residents of New Orleans Ninth Ward, emerge as unlikely heroes who rescue their neighbors and survive the chaos.  And Kim documents it all.

Kim uses her new video camera to film the events before and during the storm, documenting her neighborhood and the unfolding drama. As the flood waters rise, she and Scott bring their neighbors first into their home and then brave the flood waters to transport them all to her brother’s house on higher ground.

Emblematic of the hundreds of thousands of stranded residents, Kim, Scott and their neighbors travel by dinghy and foot  through waist high water to a nearby navel base which has plenty of housing available. They are turned away by armed guards. Later they take up refuge in a high school, and finally Scott procures a truck to drive twenty-five neighbors–including senior citizens, children, and pets–to Alexandria, Louisiana, 220 miles north of New Orleans.

Kim and Scott and bastions of strength and love as they deal with National Guard, help their displaced neighbors with FEMA paperwork and Red Cross relocation. Gradually their backstory is revealed: Kim’s mother was a crack addict who died of AIDS. Kim stole and dealt drugs to get by, marrying Scott, another dealer, five years later. Kim–as Black Kold Madina–is also an aspiring rapper. And she is a woman of astounding spirit, courage and love.

The couple’s drug dealing is born out of lack of options and opportunities. Perversely, as disastrous as Katrina proves for New Orleans, it gives them and their traveling companion Brian a chance to prove their mettle and create new lives for themselves.

As Kim and Scott travel as refugees we learn heartbreaking stories of their family and neighbors. Kim’s grandmother died during Katrina, abandoned in a hospital with other elderly patients, while an uncle died in his home. Kim finds a neighbor–seen on in her earlier footage rejoicing that his work is closed because of incoming storm–drowned in a house where he had sought shelter. Her younger brother, jailed for a misdemeanor, is one of thousands of prisoners left to fend for themselves as deputies evacuate.

Intercut with Kim’s astounding footage are news reports of the futile FEMA efforts, President Bush attempting to cope with the monumental disaster, and images of the city during and after the storm. Kim, Scott and their friend Brian relocate to Memphis, Tennessee where Kim’s cousin lives, whose words echo the thoughts of so many, says:

We have one of the greatest governments in the world. But unless you have money and status, you don’t have a government…

Hurricane Katrina showed the utter unpreparedness of our emergency systems, the failure of government agencies to help people, the lack of communication and compassion of bureaucracies–and the strength of individuals to survive, transform and transcend.

It’s revolting to learn that billions of dollars designated for displaced residents were never dispersed; to see the racism which pervades the city’s redevelopment–the majority of African-Americans remain displaced; while the majority of white residents have returned. Katrina revealed the utter lack of coordination, care and compassion our government agencies have for the poor. But hey, Harrah’s Casino was opened in time for Mardi Gras!

Kim and Scott do return to the Ninth Ward and rebuild their lives there, changed and renewed by their experiences. They are the lucky ones.