The Time's Picayune Editorial, New Orleans, Sunday, Sept 11

AN OPEN LETTER TO GEORGE BUSH

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."

That’s unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

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VANCOUVER - CANADA'S NEW ORLEANS?
What has been exposed of the Great American Way in New Orleans all last week, the plights of their homeless and poor left behind with no doctors, priests or social workers (but a kissy-faced latecomer George Bush) is the shame of their nation and its guilt for its classism, elitism and racism.

Vancouver, with its unemployed, its binners (who St Todd of the Sun would have you believe are all squeaky-happy) and welfare cheques of $510 a month (still not changed despite whopping provincial surpluses!) is not so different from New Orleans. Those poor and homeless among us would be the first to suffer any upheaval and would suffer the longest because we as a people have already shown our indifference in allowing this social situation to have collapsed into such hopelessness and despair.

They may not be starving to death just now but they are suffering, and the diseases and malnutrition they experience are all quietly contributing to their insanity and thoughts of suicide. The rage we see expressed now in New Orleans by those left behind is the rage we will see here soon enough when the earthquake or some equally devastating natural catastrophe visits us.

If the Vancouver police, the RCMP and other front line establishment functionaries could manage to stop bullying the poor and the native aboriginals long enough to understand their circumstance of destitution, a stitch of their compassion might introduce into our whole social mosaic that new thread of humanity which would absolutely preclude from happening here what is now unravelling in the southern states and before the eyes of a stunned world. What used to be the most spirited and fun place in the richest country on the globe - its Mardi Gras the very icon of joyous parading - has metamorphosed into a city of gloom and floating fecal matter and now is forever stigmatized as America's unholy shame.

The sneermeisters of Vancouver's elitists might be wise to get a good whiff of the new New Orleans and as they ask themselves, "Isn't that familiar? Smells really familiar," they may discover it's the same stench of that rationale which explains why so many Vancouverites are blithely charity-jogging over the bodies of the homeless.