HungryBlues

Heartbreak

My writing for this blog has been lighter for a little while now. That's not the reason for my title, but in case you were wondering, these are some of the things I've been doing instead of writing lengthy posts:

• three weeks of work on that article in In These Times
• a follow up piece, currently in the works
• a contract research job
• a flurry of job applications and interviews
• shepherding a special issue of Dollars & Sense

Writing less means that though I'm still reading a lot of blogs, many things slip by that under other circumstances I'd be blogging as I saw them. One such thing was yet another amazing blog post by Clayton Cubitt, this one about going back to McKain Street in New Orleans, the spot now nestled under the I-10 highway ramp that is still home to the shotgun shack where his grandmother lived almost her whole life and where she raised his mother and his aunt. I'm not going to quote it, just go read it and check out the photograph. It's heartbreaking, but it is also gorgeously elegiac. The post is about a month old, but as far as I can see, only two other people have linked to it. It's got the timelessness of art, which means that telling you about it now is still timely.

There isn't really a neat way to write about the other kind of heartbreak my title refers to. I don't know how many people check the comments over here, but one byproduct of my urge to document underpublicized injustices is that others who are suffering similar circumstances occasionally write in with own experiences, sometimes because they are desperate for help or even just because no one else seems to care.

The single post that's gotten the most of these kinds of comments is More On The Prisoners From Orleans Parish Prison, posted at the end of September. In October, I got two comments from people who had loved ones in Orleans Parish Prison at the onset of Katrina. And then last night, I received three more comments (from two people).

It has been more frequent than not that when I've known small ways to help Katrina survivors who contact me here, it's been impossible to reach them with the information they might need. In one case, for example, Juana Bourgeois said she was looking for her friend Byron Joshua. Angela Wessels from the Southern Center for Human Rights helped me determine what prison Mr. Joshua was relocated to (turns out he is one of the Coleman 900), but I was not able to reach Juana to give her the information.

On one of my posts, about the the class action suit brought by Katrina survivors against FEMA, got this wrenching comment from JeanMarie Arend:

I was filing for disability in La. at time of hurricanes Rita and Katrina. I relocated to MN. I still haven't got any housing or financial assistance. On Nov. 2 2005 it was inperative that I have a anterior cervical dysectamy and fushion with them putting in a steel rod. The vertabra affected are c-4,c=5,c=6. I suffer from partial paralysis in my arms and hands, as well as suffer from extreme headaches. Yet I am still homeless and penniless. The medical assistance I get from the state of MN. does not cover my teeth which due to the injury are broken off and abcessed. And the state of MN. allowed me 203.00$ per month which they are now taking away as of Dec. 2005, although just the healing on the surgery will be 1 and 1/2 years. I can not work and I can not get help from anywere. And yes I am filed with FEMA. They are sending me mail with my astranged husbands number on it although I have my own FEMA number I must use to refer to my case.I call them weekly and have been told 3x now to fax certian papers in which I do and yet they never get to my file.HELP ME PLEASE DISABLED IN MN> P.S. yes I refiled here in MN for my disability.

I emailed JeanMarie back immediately, but my message bounced. I think her comment is for real, since my sitemeter showed that she was writing from Minnesota and that she found HungryBlues by googling "free disaster relief for katrina victims with disabilities." I wanted to tell her that I have a friend in Minnesota who has formed a People's Hurricane Relief Fund Solidarity Group. One of the things that PHRF Solidarity Groups do is locate evacuees in their area and help them organize and obtain resources that they need.

Last night's messages were from Anicia Chatters, who is looking for a friend of hers who was in Orleans Parish Prison before Katrina, and Sherre Boteler, whose husband has been stuck in jail for 125 days, waiting for a trial for a crime she does not believe he committed.

my husband was in orleans parish jail also on a rape charge that he didnt do.....i have evidence that he was lied on and falsely arrested and still cant get help for him.....also my husband is very ill and they knew that and still left him there to die. he was also left out in the rain on the field at hunts [info]. it is all true! he has been to 3 prisons since hurricane and has been incarcrated now for 125 days just waiting to go to court.

The heartbreak is not that Ben Greenberg feels helpless to do anything for individuals who've contacted him. Rather, it's that these glimpses of individual tragedies is most of what we get to know about the lives of those worst affected by Hurricane Katrina and that each fragment of a story that we hear can be multiplied by thousands.

Sherre Boteler gets the last word:

you know what i dont understand about our "great mayor"...lol ray nagin....he's more worried about the city having mardi gras and hearing people parting in the streets than geting help for these men and women that they left to die in the wake of a cat. 5 hurricane. what a joke he is!! who gives a damn about mardi gras? and the city rebuilding for the partiers.... we want out family members back ! i have not sen my husband in 4 months. it took me 8 days to even find out that he was still alive after the hurricane. i lived from shelter to shelter all alone for 8 weeks with not even help from fema....because they are a joke too. the entire government is a joke! the "declartion of independence" says all men and women are to created equally. DOSENT THAT COUNT FOR THE ONES IN JAIL ALSO.....THEY SAVED THE ANIMALS BUT TREATED OUR HUSBANDS, MOTHERS, FATHERS, BROTHERS, AND SISTERS WORSE. WHO IS GONNA STAND UP AND BE MEN AND SAY THEY WERE WRONG....and now they are saying it may be another 6 months to a year before anyone even sees a court room. they say they lost their evidence on the cases they had well, i have proof of my husbands innocense and they still dont care. but they gonna have mardi gras! WHAT A JOKE! "I'LL NEVER GO BACK!"

I'm Back

Been working on something I hope I'll get to tell you all about soon. It's done now, so back to blogging.

Let's see how much of the backlog I can get to...

Not A Lot Of Time For Blogging

I probably won't be blogging much until Yom Kippur is over on Thursday night. I am, however, taking a moment to post an important article by Bill Quigley, on the state of things in New Orleans—so far only circulating via email on Jordan Flaherty's list-serve. Flaherty is a New Orleans union organizer, writer and editor. He has written a number of important articles on New Orleans since Katrina. To subscribe to his low-volume email list for his emails from New Orleans, email jordanhurricane-subscribeATlistsDOTriseupDOTnet.

Oh, Nate. You Shouldn't Have . . .

Nate Hertel, you really shouldn't have commented with such hackneyed right wing arguments that are so easily proven false.

And if you are so bent on starting this kind of argument, people in glass houses really should not throw stones:

Liberals are a despciable species of parasite with no concern for integrity or principles, and have demonstrated a contempt for any consistency in the values they claim to have.

Putting aside your vitriol, which I have done nothing to provoke, let's talk about "consistency in the values" that the Republican president and his staunch, ideological supporters "claim to have." Let's stick with just one example, that bedrock of right wing ideology: states rights, the very thing Jesse Jackson, Jr. was arguing against in the op-ed of his that I excerpted and you commented on.

Courtesy of Nathan Newman:

•More GOP Hypocrisy on States Rights (2005)
•So Much For States Rights (2005)
•Bush Attacks States Rights/Promotes Corruption (2005)
•Scalia Hates States Rights (2004)
•Wine and States Rights (2004)
•Bush Attacks States Rights, Again (2003)
•Bush Opposing States Rights (2002)

And you really, really should not have been blogging and leaving an uncivil comment on my blog while you were on a senate.gov computer.

From: TypePad <[email protected]>
Reply-To: Nate Hertel <nate.hertelATgmailDOTcom>
To: minorjiveATgmailDOTcom
Date: Oct 7, 2005 10:15 AM
Subject: [HungryBlues] Nate Hertel submitted a comment to 'What Liberals Don't Get About Supreme Court Nominees'

Dear Benjamin T.:

A new comment has been submitted to your weblog "HungryBlues," on the post "What Liberals Don't Get About Supreme Court Nominees."

Comment from:

Name: Nate Hertel
Email: nate.hertelATgmailDOTcom
URL: http://radarblog.blogspot.com
IP: 156.33.29.19

It looks especially bad, Nate Hertel, when a quick google search reveals that you work in the office of Senator Charles E. Grassley (Republican, Iowa). Were you behaving immaturely and irresponsibly on the Senator's time? I hope not.

CORRECTION:
Though Nate Hertel was on a senate.gov computer when he left his uncivil comment on my blog, I don't have evidence that he was also blogging at that time. The post on his blog that I had linked to is by his blog-mate slowpitch.

Abandoned And Some Other Stuff New To The Sidebar

ABANDONED
Fifty miles southwest of New Orleans, the Houma Navigation Canal is a 36 mile man-made linear gash running from the Gulf of Mexico to the small city of Houma in Terrebonne Parish. The canal bypasses several small fishing villages perched like wading birds with one leg on the two lane blacktop of State Road 57 and the other anchored in the marshy bayou. Small brackish creeks and channels connect the shrimping villages with the canal and the open water of the Gulf.

When Hurricane Rita collided with the Louisiana coast, the storm pushed a wall of water into thousands of square miles of bayou backed by south winds that kept the water bottled up for days.

The same Houma Navigation Canal that allows ships to penetrate the marsh grass and hardwood swamps of the bayou allowed the storm surge from Rita to do the same. A flood of muddy water and silt up to eight feet high ran through the bayou and swallowed up the small fishing villages of southern Louisiana. Alongside Highway 57, the towns of Ashland, Bayou Calliou and Dulac found themselves under flood waters and the sheen of diesel fuel spills.

The town of Dulac, home to a large community of Houma Native Americans was hit especially hard, their levees crippled by the same underfunding of flood protection that made New Orleans vulnerable. President Bush's 2006 budget included no money for flood protection efforts in Terrebonne despite a request for $10 million by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District. Standing in a foot of muddy water in front of the Dulac community center, Houma native and methodist pastor Kirby Verret observed, "No one really sees us down here."

FEMA certainly doesn't see Dulac or the other towns. Despite the constant buzz of helicopters in the air, and nearly 10,000 homes in Terrebonne Parish destroyed, FEMA has yet to declare this parish a disaster area. When FEMA was asked about the flood damage in Terrebonne Parish during a Sunday press conference, the government mouthpiece stated, "We have helicopters flying over the area. We are assessing the damage."

Adding ignorance to insult, folks living along Highway 57 were told by FEMA they could not remove the rapidly molding furniture and appliances from their homes or else they would void disaster funds. With 90 degree temperatures turning such an absurd restriction into a serious heath hazard, most families are emptying their homes as soon as the water recedes, FEMA's "poverty pimping" be damned.

Read the rest at Naomi Archer's blog, Real Reports of Katrina Relief. Naomi is an activist and freelance writer who has traveled from North Carolina to volunteer at the Common Ground, the community health clinic and relief center established by Malik Rahim in the Algiers neighborhood.

Real Reports is among the blogs and websites in the new NOLA section in my sidebar. Follow the links for local, grassroots people's organizations like Common Ground, CLU/PHRF, and Friends And Families Of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children and for more independent reporting about conditions on the ground in NOLA and around the Gulf Coast. See, for example, Getting Home Before It's Gone on Third World Majority.

nola blogs digest is my Kinja digest of all the blogs in the NOLA section. I hope to change that over to a feedpaper on feedster, which would have an rss feed; so far my feedpaper is not working right... Humid City is a "networking point for New Orleans in exile," with frequent updates and commentary. It probably should go without saying, but the Times-Picayune has been providing ongoing, in-depth, invaluable coverage of NOLA and surrounding areas.

To My Commenters And RSS Readers

Last night I added katrina and nola categories and retagged all the relevant posts appropriately. Sorry if that wreaked havoc on your rss readers...

There are several comments that I should have responded to already. I hope to catch up soon, probably in the form of some posts since the comments I have in mind are already a little old.

By the way, I recently joined the editorial collective at Dollars And Sense. I think I'd better add D & S to my sidebar...

Correction

On Friday, I posted a first hand account of a woman who volunteered her services as a counselor for survivors of Katrina. As noted by a Samantha Joy in the comments and by J Flenn, who emailed me last night, authorship of this piece was widely misattributed to Anne Gevarsi. The true author is Shari Julian. Like Smantha, J Flenn contacted Anne Gevarsi and received the following statement, which Samantha also received and posted in the comments today:

Since Shari Julian was on Dateline Friday, I feel that I can tell you that she is my friend who donated her time working with refugees. I am NOT a psychologist, and I don’t want her ideas misrepresented as mine; PLEASE pass this on. I know that Shari will be delighted with your response to her. I do not want any of the Princes of Spin to use this mix-up against her or against me. I agreed to pass on her reflections since I have an extensive email list. Somehow, my name became associated as the psychologist. I am an English professor, so please contact Dr. Julian at the addresses in the cc line.

J Flenn also heard directly from Shari Julian, who wrote that she is:

...a Licensed Professional Counselor with a bunch of post-doctorates not a psychologist. Counseling is actually a better preparation than psychology for this work since it works with populations without pre-existing psychopathology but rather situational abreactions. I have a lot of experience with victims of mass trauma and with crime. I am an assistant professor in the department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UTA. ...

I know this is the least of anyone's worries in Mississippi

But it appears that Hurricane Katrina has taken out the Mississippi Department of Archives and History website. None of images from Sovereignty Commission files will load until things are back on line down there.

In the meantime:

3 dead, 500,000 without power in Katrina's wake

By John Fuquay
[email protected]

Three people are dead and more than 500,000 residents are without power as Hurricane Katrina continues to ravage the state, Gov. Haley Barbour said this afternoon.

Search and rescue operations are in action in portions of Jackson and Hancock counties, and the state's Emergency Management Agency executive director Robert Latham confirmed three casualties.

The deaths occurred in Hinds, Warren and Leake counties, Barbour said.

Although officials have not released identities of the dead, they say that all three were killed by falling trees.

A woman in south Jackson was struck by a falling tree and died later at a local hospital, and a mobile home resident in Warren County died when a tree crushed the structure. A woman traveling on Mississippi 488 near Carthage in Leake County died when a tree hit her vehicle, officials said.

Barbour also said damage assessments from Hurricane Katrina, the Category 4 storm that slammed into the state this morning, are just beginning.

"We still don't have specific information," he said.

Ron Stewart of the Electric Power Associations of Mississippi said 285,000 people are without power from his association across the state.

An Entergy official said power is disrupted to about 149,000 customers.

Figures from Mississippi Power Co., which provides service to Harrison, Hancock and Jackson counties on the Mississippi coast, weren't available.

The Opposition Speaks

I got some fan mail today. Since Barbara doesn't want to back up her assertions with factual evidence, I figure the point is that they will speak for themselves—as well they do.

From: Murphey, Barbara L - xxxx, NM <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Aug 12, 2005 1:03 PM
Subject: Cindy Sheehan

Talk about MISINFORMATION….You sir are a font of misinformation….shame on you …and shame on Cindy Sheehan for dishonoring the memory of her son…and the other patriotic and brave Americans fighting to keep this country free….you sir are a blight on this country……..SHAME on you for using this poor woman’s grief to further your own selfish goals…you are a disgrace and ought to be ashamed of yourself…you disgust me..



Thanks, Barb

I did attempt to reply respectfully and invite some dialogue:

From: Benjamin Greenberg <[email protected]>
To: "Murphey, Barbara L - xxxx, NM" <[email protected]>
Date: Aug 12, 2005 1:09 PM
Subject: Re: Cindy Sheehan

Dear Barb,

Could you please prove your assertion about misinformation coming from me? If I am misinforming, then there must be facts I am suppressing. Without some facts to back up your assertion, you are merely hurling insults.

Ben Greenberg

Oh well . . .

From: Murphey, Barbara L - xxxx, NM <[email protected]>
To: Benjamin Greenberg <[email protected]>
Date: Aug 12, 2005 1:56 PM
Subject: RE: Cindy Sheehan


You have merely to go to Rush or Drudge to get the REAL facts….I don’t have time to list them all here….don’t be saying Drudge is misinforming the public….I have NEVER known Drudge or Rush to misinform in ANY way, shape, or form,…perhaps it’s your left leaning mindset that makes you think that anyone on the right is “misinforming” the public…..while in fact you leftist “propagandists” are the ones doing the real misinforming …or more like NEGLECTING to report pertinent FACTS, which then slant the story to suit your agendas. …..I have seen what the “mainstream” media has tried to do the Bush administration and it sickens me …and I assure you sir…millions of Americans feel the same way…MILLIONS…witness November 2, 2004…..Hey, we are not the same” ignorant, kept in the dark” by the mainstream leftist media, silent majority, anymore…we now have Rush, Hannity, Fox and Drudge among all the conservative blogs, and talk shows all over America to keep us informed CORRECTLY now,…and mind you , yes every story has two sides….at least FOX gives BOTH sides…unlike the leftist blogs, and the mainstream media ….sorry, but take your war protesting, lame propaganda, and spew it to your brain washed little leftist groupies…I am not buying it….nor is America….



Thanks, Barb

It was tempting to publish which government agency Barbara works for, and in which city, but a person could probably lose their job doing stuff like this on the nickel of their Federal employer.

Ah, that's better...

Thank you, Typepad. Sidebar is back to normal. Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging...