Less We Forget
As the Golden Band from Tigerland played, a national audience watched #10 LSU beat #11 Florida. Normally this would have been a great afternoon for me. It wasn’t. I wanted to cry throughout. Where was the mention of Katrina and the human toll?
It just wasn’t there. The MSM (main stream media) is now talking about Rove and Miers 24/7. Katrina is getting kicked to the curb. It is so "yesterday." But I have to ask myself how many homes have been rebuilt? How many small business’s have reopened? Not many. Not enough. As I watched I couldn’t get away from this quote in Time:
If the rhetoric seems strident, it’s only because the situation in St. Bernard Parish is so desperate. Unlike in New Orleans, which is turning on the lights and water spigots, the 67,000 people who live on the peninsula to the east–mostly white and middle-class homeowners–have nothing at all to go back to. Katrina’s tidal surge, with waves of up to 25 feet was so strong, it moved houses–their concrete foundations still attached–down streets.
The parish president, who lost his home like everyone else did, figures there is just one habitable house left out of 25,000 in the entire parish … Rodriguez figures that with only 20,000 to 25,000 residents expected back this year, the parish will have to somehow survive without sales and property taxes for two years. Five weeks after Katrina, there is no electricity and no hope of any in the coming weeks. Not one gas station or grocery store is open. The lone hospital has been shuttered–for good. Sheriff Jack Stephens, who has had to lay off half his department, is worried about keeping the parish’s remaining 182 deputies on the payroll.
New Orleans has also laid off city employees. How is this possible! We’re giving billions to rebuild, but not the funds to keep government employees, even police officers, employed!
This blog at times was getting hundreds of hits an hour. Now dozens per day. The American public is starting to forget, think about other things. If you are reading this stop, tell everyone you know to wake-up, and remember that it will take years to rebuild New Orleans. Not days or weeks.
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