The Return Home, the Road to Hell

After two weeks of refuge, Pushpa and I returned home to New Orleans to witness the damage wrought by Katrina. Although, we were beset overwhemling generosity from friends, family, and total strangers during this time on the road, as we travelled from Baton Rouge to Memphis then to Greenville, South Carolina and lastly to Williamsburg, Virginia, this time away from the Crescent City, a place we love, left my mind reeling with feelings of uneasiness.

Did our home survive the winds of Katrina's initial onslaught? After feeling okay about the winds, our concern turned to the flooding, especially with the huge gash in the 17th Street Canal. Also we worried about looters in our part of town. In the end the answers to these concerns turned out to be no. Nonetheless, they played themselves over and over in my mind that past weeks as we watched the carnage play out on the national news.

From a patchwork of websites with aerial photos, news reports, and visual accounts from freinds, we had reasons to be optimistic. Even with levee breaks and the subsequent flooding, our section of Uptown looked good. But that's the problem, you never know--not even if a good friend has stood outside your door and confirmed what you thought to be true--until you walk and see it with your own eyes.

And so, with that, these are photos from our return home.

We left at the crack of dawn from Baton Rouge and arrived in New Orleans at about seven in the morning. It took a bit fibbing and cajoling armed soldiers at a military checkpoint, which now inundated the city. The presence of armed troops give the feeling, as Pushpa put it, of the day after an apocalypse or nuclear event.











There she is,our home, looking good from the outside.


As lucky as we were, danger loomed right next door. The arbitrariness of the damage begs a question to your psyche: Why us, why did we get off so lucky? Did we do something that others did not? It always comes back to why.










These thought became more pronounced as we checked out friend's apartment. He had suspected that his home was ruined, but he not seen it, so a thread of possiblity hung in his mind. We headed over towards his place, and, after crossing St. Charles Ave., the flood marks starting rising on houses. We turned on his block and the marks were seven feet.

Here was his home:After seeing the water mark on the front door, we took a peak inside. The water was so high that moved object around, leaving the impression that some hand moved them around. Someone had, that someone was Mother Nature.

Dispelling Lies, Damn Liars, and Myths of Katrina

Laying the blame for Katrina is a curious phenomenon to watch. Local officials blame state officials, who, in turn blame federal officials, who turn around and place the blame back on the local level. This dosey-do is now in its second week.

In a now infamous interview with WWL, as things unraveled rapidly after the storm, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin blasted the federal response by firing the first salvo. “I don't want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city. […] Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here.They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country,” exclaimed the mayor, who is not a career politician and found the grandstanding and political posturing to be reprehensible.

A rebuttal to Nagin’s harangue came via Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, several days later on “Meet the Press.” “The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials," Chertoff countered after days of negative PR. And so it became blame me, I’ll blame you back.

“There'll be plenty of time to play the blame game - that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to say somebody's at fault. Look, I want to know, I want to know exactly what went on and how it went on and we'll continually assess inside my administration,” President Bush decried as he toured New Orleans on Monday.

Although the finger pointing oscillated the past two weeks, Nagin is becoming the scapegoat in all of this, quite possibly because he is not a shrewd politician, but rather a man who is trying to save the city he loves.

Immediately after things marginally stabilized in New Orleans, Nagin was rebuked for not using buses from the RTA and the Orleans Parish School District to get stranded citizens out of the city. An aerial photo of hundreds of submerged school buses accompanied this charge. To wit, Nagin replied, ““It’s up for analysis. But we didn’t have enough buses. I don’t control the school buses, and the RTA buses as far as I know were positioned high and dry. But 80 percent of the city was not high and dry. Where would we have staged them? And who was going to drive them even if we commandeered them? If I’d have marshaled 50 RTA buses, and a few school buses, it still wouldn’t have been nearly enough.”

The logistics that Nagin speaks of are daunting: Was there enough time to get everyone out, and would that take away from other needs? Has any other major city ever attempted to do something on this large of a scale? Who would drive the buses? Where would the people go? What about the cost, especially if the storm doesn’t hit? Maybe those that accost the mayor are unfamiliar with the state of finances in New Orleans, but the cost alone of busing such a large poor population out of the city every time a major storm looms would be awesome.

One only needed to witness the sad caravan of cars jammed with poor people in automobiles that barely ran on the road to Baton Rouge on Sunday afternoon and hypothesize that more people would have probably stayed and relied on the city to evacuate them. That is a frightening scenario.

Also, as callous as it sounds, the question that begs to be answered is does a city have an ethical obligation to get its poor out of harms way? Yes, without a doubt. But just who is going to pay? Are these critics going to help pay every time we need to flee? Ironically, those that make the charge against the mayor happen to align themselves with the philosophy that personal responsibility rules the day, unless, that is, if it is politically advantageous to take the other side and deflect from the President.

In the midst of the Monday morning quarterbacking, pundits curiously forget this is Mother Nature, an unpredictable, violent old lady when she wants to be, and one cannot apply science to her and expect simplicity. Remember, this storm went from a category three to a category five overnight. Damn, that impetuous, unconscionable old trollop. And before the mayor issued the first-ever mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, Kathleen Blanco, the governor, declared a state of emergency on Friday. For those that are keeping score at home, that is a full two days before the storm.

For those that are under the impression that the mayor did not do enough to get the message out, those of us that actually live in the Gulf region know, as officials and media inculcate us every year, to pre-prepare for potential hurricanes. The reason being, as Katrina showed, the window of opportunity can be small. Another tidbit people forget is that Katrina was not initially projected to hit New Orleans; instead it was that already-battered Florida/Alabama coast.

A look before Katrina reads like the Oracle at Delphi, as Gordon Russell wrote in a Times-Picayune piece, “Around 112,000 Orleanians do not own cars, according to census data. Nagin urged those people to seek rides with friends, family, neighbors and church members. Those who could not find rides were urged to get to the Superdome as quickly as possible.”

“I want to emphasize, the first choice of every citizen should be to leave the city,” the mayor stated unequivocally. Russell reported further that the mayor warned “that the Dome is likely to be without power for days — and possibly weeks — after the storm hits, and said it will not be a comfortable place.” In the same story, the mayor was quoted as calling Katrina’s approach “an unprecedented event.”

For those that cry that not enough was done by Nagin or local officials prior to the storm, a few things might enlighten those rather dark minds. First, Ron Thibodeaux from The Times-Picayune reported that Nagin said “about 60 percent of the city has evacuated for prior storms, but about 80 percent got out this time.”

The moral of the story: If someone or something is to blame, it is Katrina and no one else. Yet, there has been a political swath of destruction similar to Katrina’s wake, as Mike Brown, the director of FEMA, who was stepped down, and everything and everyone—from welfare to homosexuality—has been in the crosshairs of the blame.

And, now it seems as clearer heads begin to speak, President Bush, Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Nagin have all begun to accept responsibility, which they should. That is a step in the right direction, as the efforts could, and should, have gone better. Rather than laying the blame at the mayor’s feet, we could learn a little from the disaster.

Katrina, the Political Football

In the face of this tragedy, nothing has been as despicable as the use of Katrina as a means to exact political damage. Neither side of the aisle is innocent of this charge. As I sat a thousand miles away and watched my home become battered by wind, inundated with water and overrun by looters, I detected a palpable glee in the eyes of pundits and pols. Here is a sampling:

Yesterday, as the death toll was predicted to reach into the thousands, staunch conservative Rush Limbaugh used the occasion to vilify liberals and the national media: "The American people see the destruction, the devastation of New Orleans; they don't think politics. They don't look at this as a political event. A hurricane, it's not a political event. But there's the mainstream press because the mainstream press is on the same side of the aisle as Democrat liberal kook activists, and there is, as you know, an ongoing effort to destroy George W. Bush. 'Oh, this is Bush's whatever. This is the one we're going to get him with. Okay, the Burkett stuff didn't work and Cindy Sheehan didn't work.' Nothing is going to work."

The most disturbing part of Limbaugh's analysis is that it removes almost every human element of the disaster and reduces it to a chess match between liberals and conservatives, as the evil liberals, in their cabal with the mainstream press, relish in a national tragedy because collateral damage can be inflicted on the President. Although the prism in which Limbaugh looks at the world through is indeed delusional, there is a ray of truth there; the event is a means to hurt each other. He is merely playing the game as well, while he admonishes the other for doing the same thing. This sort of bellowing from Limbaugh is no different than any other day, only the subject matter has changed.

The Wall Street Journal got into the act as well yesterday. In an editorial by Bob Williams, a distinct move was made to deflect the blame from the President-- who took a public relations pounding last week--to local officials: "Many in the media are turning their eyes toward the federal government, rather than considering the culpability of city and state officials. I am fully aware of the challenges of having a quick and responsive emergency response to a major disaster. And there is definitely a time for accountability; but what isn't fair is to dump on the federal officials and avoid those most responsible--local and state officials who failed to do their job as the first responders. The plain fact is, lives were needlessly lost in New Orleans due to the failure of Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Blanco, and the city's mayor, Ray Nagin." Noticeably, both are Democrats and both openly criticized the federal response. This is an attempt to explain away the fact--a word rarely used in politics today--that it took almost 48 hours for the federal government to recognize the magnitude of the crisis. But that does not matter in this world; in this world, all that matters is whether your political ideology wins.

When it came to the slow response, liberals used it as a means to harm. In Monday's New York Times, Paul Krugman, a columnist who has slammed the President at any turn, had this to say: "Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after Katrina was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a 'strange paralysis' set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died.

"What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn't deliver." This opinion is merely the polar opposite of the right, a reflection in the mirror; it is as if each side lives in dfferent universes. But just what does this line of questioning help?

What it helps is political careers. The Los Angeles Times captured the Democratic left hook: "In an unusually harsh attack on a president during a crisis, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said an investigation into the government's response should ask, among other things, whether President Bush's absence from Washington impeded the government's response. Bush was vacationing at his Crawford ranch when the hurricane struck.

'How much time did the president spend dealing with this emerging crisis while he was on vacation?' Reid asked in a letter to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

'Did the fact that he was outside of Washington, D.C., have any effect on the federal government's response?' Reid asked." His vacation does not matter, because we, the diaspora of the Gulf Coast, would like to go home. What matters is what is being done.


I know it is cliche, but now is the time to put political ideologies aside and fix a region in shambles. This makes people feel like they are being used, which, in fact, is what they are; they are grist for the mill. To that end, tell your Hannitys, Colmes, Limbaughs, and other talking heads to go away. New Orleans and the Gulf Coast needs your help, not your political pursuasions.