I’m sitting on my front porch, surrounded by nature’s goodness: blue sky with wisps of clouds, birdsong and the whirr of cicadas, mid-70s temperatures, leaves rustling in a soft breeze. It’s almost impossible to imagine the violence of Katrina that was visited upon the Gulf Coast four years ago today.
A friend and neighbor of mine, David Rae Morris, lived in New Orleans at the time. Since then, he has devoted much of his work as a photojournalist to documenting Katrina and its aftermath.
All of his photos are powerful, but these scenes from the Lower Ninth Ward remind me of not just the devastation but also the role of official indifference in amplifying the suffering. Katrina more than a natural catastrophe, it was a colossal human failure as well. David’s photos serve as remembrance of a disaster whose human costs remain huge. They also sound a warning, lest we ever again allow such incompetence and callousness.
(I’m just linking to his work instead of posting an image or here, because a single photo doesn’t do it justice and I don’t want to take the images out of the context he gives them.)
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Have you seen Trouble the Water? http://www.troublethewaterfilm.com/
Saw it at Ebertfest last year
Thanks for the link. That looks like something I really ought to see.
So some shithole of a city gets flooded and a bunch of poor people have to move somewhere else. It’s called life, Babe. So let’s not get all maudlin and weepy and indignant about it.
Why do parlor intellectuals all think that people with bad teeth and no education must therefore be saints of some kind? Ugh.
Maenwhile, I am here in Kosovo, learning yet more about what makes the world tick.
I’m approving Petunya’s nasty, classist remarks only because they illustrate so precisely why New Orleans continues to be left to wallow in its own suffering today.
No one is saying that Katrina’s victims were all saints. Nor should they have to be in order to deserve empathy and material aid. I’m perplexed at how my post could be seen as maudlin and weepy. Indignant, sure – and for good reason.
Just for the record: My friends stayed in New Orleans for two years after Katrina, helping to rebuild. They left after violence came to their street, and a neighbor was murder. They are middle class, and they felt they had to move. So if you can’t find any empathy for the dispossessed, you might consider that chaos and poverty hurt everyone, not just the poor.
Petunya, future comments from you will not be approved, so don’t bother. They’ll go straight into my spam filter. Take your hate and contempt for the poor somewhere else. I’m sure there’s space for you at the Freepers or at one of Fox News’ online communities.
Oh amazing sugarmag, I just got on here to leave that link. I saw “Trouble” just last week and found it so profoundly disturbing . . . You won’t forget it Sungold.
p.s. I rented it from my local video store.
I’m guessing we don’t have it locally, but I’ll check!