Hurricane FEMA

So let me get this straight. FEMA can help rebuild the touristy areas of New Orleans and give $3M to rebuild the historic mansion of Jefferson Davis, but the Ninth Ward still looks like it did in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, and now they’re kicking people out of mobile homes when they have yet to actually assist them in rebuilding their lives?

Shortly after noon, FEMA agents began rapping on the trailer doors, their knocks resounding inside the tinny white homes. Everyone in the park, the agents announced without warning, would have to pack and leave within 48 hours.

Where do we go now?

Why?

What about school?

To the residents of the Yorkshire Mobile Home Park, all of them families displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency crews offered answers that were uncertain and sometimes contradictory. As residents spilled out of their homes to meet their similarly bewildered neighbors, the adults wondered where they would be sent next, and how far they might wind up from their jobs. Some began sobbing. Then the children, seeing their parents’ tears, began crying, too. A woman fainted, and an ambulance came.

…

About 12,000 households in Louisiana live in such settlements, temporary arrangements that only out of desperation are being stretched out indefinitely.

Almost all of the trailers’ occupants were renters before the storm; unlike homeowners, they received no direct rebuilding assistance from the federal government. [Full story]

A lot of people have gotten angry that so many of the victims of Katrina are still on public assistance after a year and a half. But the rebuilding policies in New Orleans — razing low-income housing units for more expensive housing developments and ritzy apartments, failing to provide any assistance in rebuilding areas that were stricken by poverty before the Hurricane — have caused the price of living in New Orleans to shoot upward.

Why can’t people move? Well, moving costs money. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck because you aren’t getting assistance in replacing everything lost in the disaster, how can you afford a security deposit or a van rental? Jobs aren’t exactly falling out of the sky everywhere.And, for some, New Orleans is home and has been for generations. This sums it up neatly:

“People say we shouldn’t still be living in a FEMA park,” said one former Yorkshire tenant, a Wal-Mart worker who wanted to be identified only as “P.” “But take a look at the rents people have to pay in New Orleans now — who can afford that?”

And for those who live in other areas affected by the hurricanes, the focus on New Orleans has often meant a lack of assistance in places like Sligo, La., and the Gulf Coast.

Perhaps if FEMA actually assisted living people instead of dead secessionists, you know, like they were supposed to, they would be able to rebuild their lives enough to go off of government assistance?

Immigration raids can divide families

Um, no shit?

They are the hidden side of the government’s stepped-up efforts to track down and deport illegal immigrants: Toddlers stranded at day care centers or handed over to ill-equipped relatives. Siblings suddenly left in charge of younger brothers and sisters.

When illegal-immigrant parents are swept up in raids on homes and workplaces, the children are sometimes left behind - a complication that underscores the difficulty in enforcing immigration laws against people who have put down roots and begun raising families in the U.S.

Three million American-born children have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant; one in 10 American families has mixed immigration status, meaning at least one member is an immigrant here illegally, according to the Pew Center for Hispanic Research and the office of U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano. Children born in the U.S. are automatically American citizens and are not subject to deportation. [Full story]

I have a feeling that this is only news because many of the people who talk about “the immigration problem” forget that immigrants are actual people, and deporting them may affect others.

If L.A. were Baghdad

One of the reasons I find Twain’s “The War Prayer” so powerful is because he is dead-on in his characterization of how people think about war. When people talk about bombing the Middle East or Iraq into oblivion or how we have to destroy the enemy, they forget that the people on the other side are human, too.

So I was surprised to see this opinion column run in the L.A. Times by Patt Morrison. After wondering what it would be like if California were at war, she took some of the major stories in Iraq and replaced place names with California cities and regions.

Feb. 1: Twin bombings at South Coast Plaza killed at least 73 people. Moments after the first bomb, a Costa Mesa police officer spotted a man flinging open his jacket to show his explosives belt. The officer shouted “Suicide bomber!” and ran toward the man. He flung his arms around the bomber to shield others from the force of the blast and was killed in the second explosion.

…

Feb. 25: At least 40 USC students were killed when a suicide bomber blew herself up at the university’s Marshall School of Business. Last month, 70 USC students were killed in an attack, and two months ago, gunmen fought across a playground at Brentwood Elementary School. Across L.A., attendance at K-12 schools is down by nearly two-thirds.

…

March 2: A videotape sent to KCBS-TV appears to show 18 kidnapped and blindfolded Long Beach police officers being shot to death. The bodies of 14 of the missing officers, their hands tied behind their backs, were found near a Long Beach middle school the day before, the same day that a Santa Monica police officer and his bride were the target of a car bomb that blew up as the newlyweds arrived at their new home. They were unhurt, but three wedding guests were killed.

…

Imagine City Hall’s walls turned to Swiss cheese from tank rounds; Disney Hall, the Westwood Federal Building, the Griffith Observatory — every notable building in Los Angeles, in California, sandbagged and surrounded by slab walls as high as two men.

Imagine arriving early at work so that armed men can search your car. Imagine falling behind on your mortgage to pay for security to keep you alive on your way to work, especially along violence-plagued arteries such as Sepulveda, Olympic and Vermont Avenue.

Lay a map of Baghdad alongside your paper every day and fit the Iraq news to your hometown. The Mansour neighborhood could be Brentwood. Zafraniya could be Bell Gardens; Mahmoudiya, that’d be Buena Park. And today’s car bomb, today’s discovery of bodies — it looks like it could be right where you live. [Full story]

While there was some positive response when the column was published at Huffington Post, there was negative as well:

… What if some powerful foreign press were lavishing in the bloodshed, abetting the propaganda that is the lifeblood for the worst elements of the city.

And separate from all this Iraq stuff, LA is really a dump. Before you start worrying about international affairs maybe you should clean up your own acts. Your and embarrassment to the rest of the country.

 

Patt– Argh !!! Don’t give “THEM” any ideas …

 

L.A. may very well end up like Baghdad in a few years if the borders are not secured and the immigration problem, legal and illegal, is not dealt with.

(That one really makes me mad. The “immigration problem” needs to be “dealt with”? That’s accepted political rhetoric… but replace “immigration” with “Jewish” and you can see why that’s damned scary.)

To bad we couldn’t attack LA. Eliminate a lot of problems there and that war would be very quick because it’s mad up mainly of the cut & run left.

And to top it off, someone’s quoting Orwell:

…there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmited motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism.

Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries…

…All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.

- George Orwell, 1945

While I haven’t seen much other discussion of the column, it appears nothing has changed about human nature since Twain wrote his condemnation of U.S. intervention in the Philippines in 1905: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”