Remembering Katrina

On the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, some recommended reading: the special Katrina issue of Southern Cultures, cover to cover. Amazing stories, including a riveting first-person account, from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, of taking the high ground in an elegant, "safe" old inn, being engulfed in water up to the second floor, floating out into open sea, holding on for dear life to the limbs of a live oak tree, and more.

An update to their story: the live oak tree has since died, and it's been refashioned into angels standing watch where the old inn used to be.

FEMA: "temporary" insanity

The Katrina Cottage was an inspired idea, "a more dignified version of the FEMA trailer." Recently it won a People's Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. This month, Lowe's is set to begin selling Katrina kits.

But its original mission was foiled. According to FEMA, it's "semi-permanent" housing, and they'll only pay for "temporary" shelter.

Wasn't it also FEMA's position that they wouldn't pay for "temporary" hotel/motel stays because they wanted to transition folks to more stable, indeed "permanent," housing?

UPDATE: Tucker, while doing webmaster duty, noted that this is my 1,000th blog post! Oh dear.

Stories from New Orleans

A year after Katrina, I'm wondering what happened to Abram Himelstein, the New Orleans writer, schoolteacher, and activist who, last I had heard, was "In Exile" in Houston. His blog hasn't been updated since January. By then he was back in New Orleans with his wife, trying to put their home and their lives back together. He was happy that his student-authors from the Neighborhood Story Project were also finding their way back. Two days before the hurricane, plans were being set for a big party to celebrate one of the five books in the series, Ebony Bolding's Before and After North Dorgenois. The party, alas, was not to be: the food, the drinks, the cars, the houses themselves were swept away. Even the books were swept away, several thousand of them; but the computer they were printed from was not. After the hurricane, the project turned to looking for a new publisher, one that could work with their lack of cash.

Soft Skull Press took them on. (Soft Skull being known in these parts for its part in the documentary Horns and Halos, by Chapel Hill native Michael Galinsky and his wife Suki Hawley.)

This summer, Himelstein and his co-director in the story project, Rachel Breunlin, apparently were artists in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, California. (Along with Durham sculptor/installation artist Bryant Holsenbeck.) We'll look forward to seeing what they do next.

SC college official lets guard down, loses job

In Greenville, S.C., an administrator of a technical college resigned after twice referring to school-age hurricane evacuees as "yard apes."

This news comes to me from the H-Net Afro-Am listserv, which more and more is an indispensable source for Katrina news and opinion. It's going to be an invaluable archive of what you aren't necessarily getting in the MSM.

Homing in

Yesterday's homelessness forum was a success. It was well attended, the speakers were inspiring, and the notion of "housing first" got a good airing. Since the first of these forums last fall when the idea of creating our own 10-year plan was initially raised, I think there's been an increase our collective awareness of the seriousness of the problem and the many levels on which it needs to be addressed. All the talks were compelling, but I want to share Mayor Foy's remarks, because they were exceptional.

To talk about ending homelessness is ambitious. What we’re really looking at is jobs. We live in a capitalist society, and we’re probably not changing that any time soon. We need jobs available to create adequate income--jobs that pay wages that can support some kind of healthy lifestyle, which leads to the issue of health care. Health care is unaffordable for virtually everyone in our society. And then education. So there are at least four things that are really undergirding the effort to end homelessness.

Hurricane Katrina really shows us some things about us, some ugly things, but also that the American people have great heart and great love for our fellow human beings. And that’s represented in this outpouring of help and humanity that we have all participated in as well as witnessed. And it also shows the vastness of resources that we have in our society--and we’re very, very stingy. We’re very, very, very selfish as a society.

I heard on the radio this morning an economist say that 200,000 people being absorbed into the Texas economy is minuscule, it means nothing, it’s easy. It is? I mean, that’s news to me. People in North Carolina don’t have jobs. People that live in Texas don’t have jobs. There’s a big disconnect between what we accept and what could be. Because the economist was really just talking in terms of numbers, not making any kind of moral judgment; he was just saying our economy is so huge, sure, 200,000 new jobs is a blip on the screen. But that’s not how we conduct our lives. We say people are always going to be living on the margins.

So our challenge is to make an enduring difference. That’s another thing the hurricane helps us put into perspective. We have witnessed extraordinary generosity, we have felt extraordinarily generous, but how long is that going to last? We’re talking about a 10-year plan, we have to work to make sure it’s a difference that matters in the long term. And so what I think we are all saying by being here, by being interested, is that we don’t expect that the federal government is going to handle homelessness, or the state; we expect that we are going to have to do something about it. We take it as a personal challenge and make a personal commitment. Those of us who live in this community together make the commitment.

We have beacons of hope, the IFC, the land trust, and so I think it’s true that we are able to make a difference in this local community, that it is an ambitious goal, but that we can achieve it. There has been a lot of chatter and analysis about moral values. It seems to me that the basic moral value is, it’s not us and them, not us and homeless people, it’s all of us. The fundamental moral value is that we are all brothers and sisters and we have a responsibility to our brothers and sisters.

And so that leads me to what I’m supposed to talk about: where are we now? I sort of think that is where we are, but here’s the data. We expect to complete the development of the 10-year plan over the next 12 months and that we’re going to have a project administrator to coordinate the efforts, a steering committee of elected people, service providers, business people, homeless people. The development process of the plan is that we’re not creating something new from whole cloth. There are a lot of examples of what we can or can’t do from other parts of the country and state. Over the next several months that’s what we’re going to be doing. I urge all of you to participate to the extent that you can, but also to keep in mind and to believe that it is possible to have a society as rich as ours based on moral values that does not accept that some people just will be homeless.

New Orleans: looking forward, looking inward

Talking about New Orleans today, our town manager Cal Horton, who knows a thing or two about the workings of cities, speculated that it might just never come back. I don't know, though. I'm betting on the Big Easy. Cities are resilient. "Although cities have been destroyed throughout history--sacked, shaken, burned, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and poisoned--they have, in almost every case, risen again like mythic phoenix," write Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella. Curiously, "the rate of resilience seems to have increased since 1800 even though the mechanisms for destruction have multiplied."

But that will take time. Now is another story. Yesterday's story was that martial law had been declared in and around the city. Today's correction is that martial law is not, technically, possible under Louisiana law, though it is certainly possible to declare a state of emergency.

Ah, the phrases that come so easily, the metaphors we live by. I wonder why?