Reply #28: George? Is that you?

[No Exit]

Are you vacationing in Crawford AGAIN??

Seriously, let me give you the article. It's about republican-turned-democrat "Reggae Ray" Nagin.

The Birmingham News

`Reggae Ray' Nagin no help to Big Easy

Sunday, December 04, 2005

SARAH WHALEN

Call him "Reggae Ray."
Yeah, mon. That's New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin.
Note Nagin's first name-"C." As in, now you "see" him, now you don't.

A blogger called me Wednesday before Thanksgiving. "Guess where your mayor is!"

"Nagin? He's in Washington, D.C., meeting federal officials to get help for the city," I confidently replied. His publicist had said so.

"No!" the blogger said, laughing. "Nagin's in Jamaica."

"Well," I pondered aloud, "Maybe he's on a President George W. Bush-like `working vacation.'"

I called three New Orleans friends, all of whom have lost their homes, and they assured me it couldn't be true. "Nagin's in Washington, D.C., making them help us," they insisted.

But Thanksgiving week, as flood-ravaged New Orleanians bowed their heads and prayed over their food at celebrations muted by despair and overwhelming loss, Reggae Ray partied in Jamaica.

"You are an heir of a great tradition of destroyed cities," a friend of mine toasted when he learned I was heading home. "Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden, Berlin, San Francisco - they all came back. And your city will come back, too."

Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I prayed that was true as I drove in. Thursday we shared our meal, and Friday, I inspected my little cottage. It's just a shell now, all its gardens ripped away. A frightening, graveyard-like dust covers everything.

It's all dead there.

Inside, my house, like many hundreds of thousands, is wet and dank. Belongings lie in rotting clumps, drenched in puddled floodwaters so acrid the Oriental rugs melted. All good furniture collapsed, and what was cheap simply dissolved. Beloved books lie in fetid piles. Rusty floodlines mark the inside and outside of everything. There's no fixing most of it. People come to see and then lose hope.

The holidays are coming up, and depression's a real possibility," a local radio announcer warned as I drove away with a pathetic bundle of moldy baby pictures, Spode china odds and ends and some of my son's drawings that were, miraculously, not too badly mottled. A popular pediatrician committed suicide after his medical practice collapsed because our children are gone. "Suicides are on the rise at this difficult time," the announcer intoned. "Don't kill yourself."

Where's Mayor Nagin?

Who knows? Nagin's the "leader" who vanished during the height of Hurricane Katrina, returning without explanation and silently ensconcing himself in his hotel suite "headquarters" as floodwaters claimed the city and over a thousand lives.

Where's Mayor Nagin?

He didn't show on Nov. 18 when the Urban Land Institute unveiled its keynote recovery plan. And when Audubon Zoo triumphantly re-opened, Nagin should have been there hugging every child, shaking every hand. But he didn't show. And when top city officials and Carnival leaders held their news conference to announce their Mardi Gras plans, he didn't show. Why? He was still in Jamaica., where Nagin claimed he wants to "strengthen ties."

Did Jamaica take our refugees? Do our children clog Jamaican schools? Are Jamaican homes and hotels bulging with New Orleans' dispossessed?

Why doesn't Nagin strengthen Texas ties?

Infested with drugs and crime, Jamaica's too much like the dark side of New Orleans we also lost when we lost it all.

But Texas took us in. One friend sobbed telling how he drove into Houston with his sick, elderly parents, his sister and their office workers, and as they approached an overpass, someone unfurled a sheet spraypainted: "Our Home is Your Home."

I vote for the Heartland over Ganjaland.

It's time for Reggae Ray to disappear, and Mayor Nagin to get with the program. Sarah Whalen is a photojournalist born and raised in New Orleans, and who lived there at the time of Hurricane Katrina. She has relocated to Texas while her house dries out. E-mail: [email protected].

http://www.al.com/opinion/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/opinion/113369172528060.xml&coll=2&thispage=2

Every time I have talked to my repuke-deluded friends--the ones who have ties to New Orleans--about the devastation, I have staunchly defended democrats Blanco and Nagin. I have always turned the conversation to what the * administration didn't do, and is still not doing. And there's plenty of material on THAT. Let's face it: the feds have much more power than do the state or city. They could fix this if they wanted to (except they couldn't bring back the dead.)

But there is plenty of blame to go around. And republican-turned-democrat Nagin isn't helping things. I don't see him as a very effective leader. I think he is trying, but when he travels the southeast, begging his people to come home, his people answer: "We WANT to come home, but we're not ABLE to come home!" And it's true! He wants them to come home, people like me want them to come home, but nobody is making it possible for them to go back home. New Orleanians love their city. They even hate to leave it. But there is just no place for them to live in the city right now.

I don't know what the solution is.