In Attics and Rubble, More Bodies and Questions

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/us/nationalspecial/11body.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

April 11, 2006
In Attics and Rubble, More Bodies and Questions
By SHAILA DEWAN

NEW ORLEANS, April 5 — When August Blanchard returned to New Orleans from Pennsylvania in late December, his mother was still missing. Family members, scattered across the country, had been calling hospitals, the Red Cross and missing persons hot lines, hoping she had been rescued.

But Mr. Blanchard, 26, had a bad feeling. Twice, he drove past the pale green house on Reynes Street in the Lower Ninth Ward, where he and his mother, Charlene Blanchard, 45, had lived, yet he could not bring himself to enter.

It was not until Feb. 25 that one of Mr. Blanchard's uncles nudged the front door open with his foot and spied Ms. Blanchard's hand. Dressed in her nightgown and robe, she lay under a moldering sofa. With her was a red velvet bedspread that her daughter had given her and a huge teddy bear.

The bodies of storm victims are still being discovered in New Orleans — in March alone there were nine, along with one skull. Skeletonized or half-eaten by animals, with leathery, hardened skin or missing limbs, the bodies are lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters or lying face down, arms outstretched on parlor floors. Many of them, like Ms. Blanchard, were overlooked in initial searches. .....

[MADem]

1. How COULD they have been "overlooked????"

The only way they could have been overlooked is if no one went over there and did any looking.

Did they pay them by the house, or by the hour, or what? Did they just spray paint bullshit info on the house, and not even go in???

Such a great shame. A great shame.

[TomClash]

8. They always overlook "the Wrong Classes" nt

[malaise]

2. This is so sad

How have they been allowed to get away with this total dispect for human beings?

[izzie]

3. We sound like a third world country

--

[malaise]

5. Please don't insult those of us

in developing countries. We find and bury our dead.

[hlthe2b]

9. Yes, Malaise...

That was what struck me during this national nightmare... Having worked in many developing countries, I've witnessed directly or from a distance the priority given after disasters to recovering the dead. Even in those countries, whose government is overtly corrupt (not unlike our own, I might mention), still the intense effort to find and bury the dead. One might understand in settings (e.g., Kashmiri earthquake, landslides in Guatemala, Columbia, and elsewhere)the need for mass burials at some point.

Here, we aren't even undertaking mass burials, but simply leaving them as they lay for animals to devour. And yet, some, in our country still deign to call others in the world "3rd world?" I will never forget, nor forgive this administration and what they have done to our country.

[saigon68]

4. Its Kafkaesque

The term, which is quite fluid in definition, has also been described as "marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies" <1> and "marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport . . . haunt his innocence - The New Yorker." <2>

It can also describe an intentional distortion of reality by powerful but anonymous bureaucrats. "Lack of evidence is treated as a pesky inconvenience, to be circumvented by such Kafkaesque means as depositing unproven allegations into sealed files ..." Another definition would be an existentialist state of ever-elusive freedom while existing under unmitigatable control.

[xchrom]

6. this is unbelievable -- the failure just goes on and on.

we send the best of our young to wither and die in iraq for a lie -- and we leave our neighbors in new orleans and mississppi to live in a continuing abject nightmare.

do i think the two are connected?

yes. these two horrifying realities go a long way to disclose the rot that has come into this country through the conservative door.

[leftchick]

7. third world countries have done better than the US in natural disasters

at least they recover and count their dead in a timely manner. :cry:

[rodeodance]

10. yes, and the world knows it (even as many in US deny it).

[liberal N proud]

11. No one could have anticipated that these people would be in those places

[WePurrsevere]

12. Never forget every drop in the ocean of this MALadministration lies,

crimes, MIHOP/LIHOP and every damn attack on humanity whether deliberate or through negligence. ALWAYS remember.. ALWAYS.

"God" may forgive Bush and his neo-CON cabal... but I'm hoping the American voters and karma remember really really well and pay back's a bitch. :nuke:

[DUHandle]

13. If someone from my family was missing

I would look for them and I don’t think that this is a heroic response.

If Mr. Blanchard wasn’t up for looking for his mom I candidly think the worst of Mr. Blanchard.