How Often Do We Need to Say It?


As New Orleans goes, so goes the nation, and that's not a joking matter, despite yet another embarrassing foot-in-mouth moment for Ray Nagin:

Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.

Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.

While many of the homeless people do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina. And about 30 percent had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Not far from the French Quarter, flanking Canal Street on Claiborne Avenue, they are living inside a long corridor formed not of walls and a roof but of the thick stench of human waste and sweat tinged with alcohol, crack and desperation.

The inhabitants are natives like Ronald Gardner, 54, an H.I.V.-positive man who said he had never before slept on the streets until Katrina. Or Ronald Berry, 57, who despite being a paranoid schizophrenic said he had lived on his own, in a rented house in the Lower Ninth Ward, for a dozen years before Katrina. Both men receive disability checks for $637 a month, not nearly enough to cover post-hurricane rents.

Actually, it shouldn't matter whether or not these individuals had NOLA addresses prior to the storm and flood...because they are CITIZENS of the United States of America. Yet, the Bush administration policy, whether by intent or neglect, is to treat these citizens as if they're Third World.

Just like they're doing to our soldiers. Just like they're doing to our children.

Admittedly, they're doing a bit worse to the Iraqi people, but that's hardly encouraging.

And if the mortgage crisis/fallout doesn't demonstrate that they'll do it to pretty much anyone, I don't know what additional evidence is needed...