Recovery?
Okay, It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing. Not even the numbers of the dead and wounded can be established…. The numbers don’t add up. I am confused.
— Hunter S. Thompson on September 12th, 2001
That was from a column Hunter posted after one of the first disasters of the 21st century (after the November 2000 election). What would Hunter be saying today, 5 years after Katrina? What would he say about that Rally held at the very spot where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech 47 years ago? We’ve all asked ourselves "what would Hunter say" over and over since he died. But again, as I posted yesterday, one thing we do know, he did believe in RECOVERY. Are we even close? I don’t feel qualified to answer that question. But here are some clips from the weekend news:
What happened to that national conversation we were all supposed to have about what was exposed by Katrina?” Doug Brinkley says we “got amnesia” and “forget quickly” on "meet the press:"
Wendell Peirce’s response:
I think the thing you have to remember is that we have to understand that the disaster lifted the veil of issues of race, of issues of class, not only in this city but in the country. If we are to move past it and truly be a part of this wonderful recovery that we’re feeling, we can’t looked at it through rose colored glasses. there’s not an indictment of one person. it’s an indictment of us all.
by Glynnis MacNicol’s analysis of that conversation here.
Aspen Daily News reporter, Andrew Travers, covered the anniversary of Katrina from Mississippi, without rose colored glasses that also hit home:
PEARLINGTON, Miss. — Five years ago this morning a 20-foot storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico swept over this swampy coastal hamlet. The eye of Hurricane Katrina, a storm that would kill 1,800 and cause more property damage than any natural disaster in American history, passed almost directly over it with winds sustaining 140 miles-per-hour.
A few hours later, Pearlington was gone.…
Unincorporated and nestled on the Pearl River, which serves as the Louisiana-Mississippi border here, Pearlington had been home to about 2,400 people in 800 homes before the storm. Afterward, the population was effectively zero.
There’s no monument to Katrina in Pearlington, though 30 or so homes still abandoned with yards gone to jungle around them are a stark reminder of the storm. Some houses still bear the spray-painted “X” the National Guard marked on them to signify they’d searched them for dead bodies after the storm. Today there will be no commemorative ceremony, no party.
“My view is that it came and it went and it’s time to move on,” said West Hancock County Deputy Fire Chief Deedra Burton, a lifelong resident, during a tour of the area. “This is the type of community where we always look for an excuse to party, but this is no excuse to party.”
Cspan, (the only channel I have at the moment) aired an interesting Q&A with Allison Plyer about the DATA from New Orleans. I searched the website: The "numbers" are highlighted in a ten minute video here.
But I’ll end with Hunter’s missive from the last page of Hey Rube :
"Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Environment"
That is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks that "it doesn’t matter who’s President" has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World–or been beaten and gassed by police for trespassing on public property–or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons–or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.
–Hunter S. Thompson, Hey Rube
Okay. Goodnight and good luck.
Anita
