I figured that this was going to be just as much of
a fact-finding, hands-on mission as well as a rescue. However, it seems like something out of South Africa, with people being shuttled back and forth, with no place to call home.
We fill the three buses quickly with the people waiting outside. Priority is given to women and children and elderly people as well as families. We take 150 people. Nobody asks where the buses are headed. Nobody cares. And I begin to worry. Permission has not been given to transport these people to the air force base. I worry that these victims are being used as fodder for a political agenda. I wonder where they would have been taken if the Black Caucus had not shown up with their own buses. Somewhere better? But then I think at what point do you just go? I wouldn't wish that airport on anyone. I console myself with Senator Fields' comments earlier: Even if these people sleep on the buses it will be better than their last six nights.
When the convoy arrives, though, they're not allowed to bring the evacuees inside an Alexandria shelter. It seems like a major setback.
"You will absolutely not get off this bus," an officer says. When Jesse Jackson [also part of the delegation] gets out of the front car he's immediately accosted by a shelter resident.
"You can't bring those types of people here," the man shouts. "Those are rapists and looters."
"Now hold on," Jesse says.
"Get the hell out of here," the man says. The police guard the buses but make no move to stop the man, who seems like he might attack the Reverend. "It's not a race thing," the man continues. "My wife is half-black." He points to a pregnant woman standing nearby. "We don't want your kind. This is a good place."
The people on the bus are not allowed off. Apparently the shelter is 85 percent full and has only 20 open beds.
Fields says that someone called ahead to the shelter and was told it was all right to go there. But the leader of the Red Cross at the shelter vehemently denies that anyone called her. Jesse Jackson grumbles that they were set up.
Finally, at a calming moment, they are informed that there is another shelter five minutes away that could accommodate them with 150 beds. They go on to a facility that seems like heaven to many who sat in feces and urine for days. There are big-screen TVs, sanitary bathrooms with showers, food, cots. What is more, they are openly welcomed, especially by Leanne Murphy, CEO of the Central Louisiana chapter of the Red Cross.
"We've been waiting for folks for two days," [Police Chief Jay] Barber tells me. "We've been expecting people. I've been taking walk-ins."
I can't believe what he's saying. These people were lying in shit two days ago. We passed hundreds of empty buses on the way to the airport. How could a well-staffed, clean, secure, working shelter with 150 open beds in Louisiana sit half full for two days while people are being turned away at the Astrodome in Houston and bussed to Utah?
So these people won't have the wherewithal to return. A dispersed, displaced, demoralized population that is being dumped on other states.
Elliott, along with Jesse Jackson, finally makes it to England Air Force Base and gets a tour hosted by Bridgette Brown, vice chair of the Airport Board.
She tells us, "Today the board voted unanimously to accept people from New Orleans." She thinks it will cost $1.6 million to the community. I wonder where the federal government is in all of this. I also wonder whether the board would have moved to open the facility if it had not been for the Black Caucus's intervention.
Brown takes us on a tour of the facilities. There are four buildings with 480 double rooms capable of medium-term housing for 960 residents. The electricity and water work. The buildings clearly haven't been used for a while and need a cleaning but don't seem terrible. Compared to the airport they don't even need a cleaning.
"We should have this place ready in two days," she says. "We could have had it ready earlier but not everybody was in agreement.
"How many acres do you have here?" Senator Fields asks.
"Three thousand."
"That's a lot of tents," he replies.
[...]
"You use these buses to take people to Utah you're taking that bus out of commission," Senator Fields tells me. But lack of buses is not the problem. There are unused buses -- I saw 150 of them on the road -- and unused buildings. There are people living in conditions that would be unacceptable in the Third World.
But it does happen in paternalistic, oppressive oligarchies in the Third World where people are living in the equivalent of dumps. The United States is fast beginning to look like one of those oligarchies, with a crumbling infrastructure, and an inability to take care for, rather than warehouse, its own people at a time of crisis.
And in the long term, busing people out of the state is also the equivalent of abandonment. The great real estate companies are probably rubbing their palms in anticipation of the windfall about to occur. Whites can anticipate moving back into the city in larger numbers--for some this would mean retaking 'their' city. The bidding is probably happening right now as I write this. Property that they refused to upgrade because blacks were living there can now be bulldozed. Then they can create condos, luxury apartments and malls--in effect, a whole new New Orleans.
Elliott ends his story with his head on a pillow on a rug in an office, but I wouldn't exactly be sleeping well with this in mind.
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