"Excuse my French — everybody in America — but I am pissed."

[jack_babalon]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

~William Butler Yeats,
The Second Coming

I've been reading the news feeds from New Orleans between breaks. This morning I watched a CNN correspondent report live from a police station that was under siege. Police snipers were stationed along the roof returning fire. There was an explosion somewhere in the city but it was too dangersous to send a response team or even a news crew to investigate. A part of me can't believe i'm seeing this happen. What would I do to stay alive? At what point do I get to say the 'Social contract' is null & void. I was talking about this with some of the women here at the office. We've agreed that if you're starving or need insulin then fine you should do what you gotta do. But when we read about people looting DVD players & TV sets, then the governments gotta step in:
"Get off your asses and let's do something," Mayor Ray Nagin told WWL-AM Thursday night in a rambling interview in which he cursed, yelled and ultimately burst into tears. At one point he said: "Excuse my French — everybody in America — but I am pissed."

Across the city, law and order broke down. Police officers turned in their badges. Rescuers, law officers and helicopter were shot at by storm victims. Fistfights and fires broke out Thursday at the hot and stinking Superdome as thousands of people waited in misery to board buses for the Houston Astrodome. Corpses lay out in the open in wheelchairs and in bedsheets. The looting continued.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco called the looters "hoodlums" and issued a warning to lawbreakers: Hundreds of National Guardsmen hardened on the battlefield in Iraq have landed in New Orleans.
"They have M-16s and they're locked and loaded," she said. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will."

Meanwhile I read about the conditions in the Superdome. It reads like it was torn out of a William Burroughs story or a JG Ballard novel:
Police Chief Eddie Compass said there was such a crush around a squad of 88 officers that they retreated when they went in to check out reports of assaults.


"We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten," Compass said. "Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon."

A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.

"There's a lot of very sick people — elderly ones, infirm ones — who can't stand this heat, and there's a lot of children who don't have water and basic necessities to survive on," said Daniel Edwards, 47, outside the center. "We need to eat, or drink water at the very least."

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

"I don't treat my dog like that," Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. "You can do everything for other countries, but you can't do nothing for your own people."

From http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&u=/ap/20050902/ap_on_re_us/hurricane_katrina_82

Deep down I refuse to believe that there is a line where we renege our humanity for survival. Call it some vague sense of candide or naive optimism.

"...Because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death..."
Anne Frank