DED Space links to a Katrina story --
http://dedspace.blogspot.com/2005/11/katrina-story.html
that makes me sad and angry, though not surprised.
New Orleans has sort of fallen off most people's screens these days. I hear about it, because of my family. Metairie, where most of my family lives, is partly up and running again, my mother tells me; but New Orleans itself is not.
My youngest brother lives in the city. His house still has no power, though he says power crews are "supposed" to be coming through soon. He and his wife are nearly the only ones living in their neighborhood at the moment. One house down the block is also occupied, and another house several streets over -- and this is typical, apparently. Only about 15% of the population of New Orleans has returned.
Shops aren't opened. Stores that do open, close by five, for the most part. Houses are decayed and fallen. My mother says the landscape is gray. Places burn down frequently. At night, the city is utterly dark, and utterly silent.
My brothers went to the French Quarter on Halloween evening. They said it was bizarre. (Halloween, you might know, was, or used to be, a huge deal in the Quarter.) They said it was like a J. Crew Halloween.
Oh, what's been done to my city.
1 hour ago
2 comments:
It's odd. The media said that about Halloween too, but my friend was there, and said it was pretty much like any other French Quarter Halloween. I think it must have depended on where you went.
Thanks for the link.
hey u know how we as a nation, as a whole, love African art and Native American stuff and we buy it like its candy (the good kind), but we're buying stuff from the past, stuff we didn't value until it was damn near extinct, and really don't properly value it now. U know what I'm talking about? Well, maybe, just maybe, this time the weather killed a culture, but we still can't value it enough(or the ppl obviously)to take care of it, to pay the right amount of attention to it the way we should. 15% is a low number. It doesn't sound like rebuilding is at the forefront of anyone's mind.
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