Anderson@Large

Charity Should Begin at Home

President Bush’s less than excellent adventure in Latin America (and here) mercifully (for him) will soon come to an end.

While Bush is as unpopular in the U.S. as he is south of the border, this is home so we have to let him in.

Perhaps when he gets home, he’ll read the back issues of the Washington Post that have been piling up at the White House.  If he does, he’ll see a front-page story detailing how Katrina survivors were hit by “Hurricane FEMA” and given 48 hours to pack up their sh stuff and move out.

As funky as that FEMA trailer park reportedly is, it’s the only home these evacuees have nearly 18 months after the storm.

Before making promises to the world's poor, Bush should help all Americans “feel the full promise of society.”   He can start by answering Katrina survivors’ cry for help:

Where do we go now?

Where indeed?

Missing New Orleans

Mardi Gras revelers have gone home. The beads and empty cups have been swept off Bourbon Street.

But for the tens of thousands of Katrina survivors still living in FEMA trailers, the estimated 53,000 students who have "disappeared" from the Louisiana public school system and the public housing residents who have been barred from returning to habitable units, the party has been over for 543 days.

New Orleans Bushwhacked

In his 5,600-word State of the Union address, President Bush didn't say squat about the state of New Orleans (here and here).

To be sure, words aren’t Bush’s forte.  But any Katrina survivor could have told him in eight words the state of things in the Crescent City: I got it bad (and that ain’t good).

As is her wont, Rep. Maxine Waters had a few choice words for Bush. Waters told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!:

As a chair of the Subcommittee of the Financial Institutions Committee on Housing and Community Development, I was very, very pained that the President seems to have forgotten about the catastrophe in the Gulf Coast. Those people who were sitting in their homes in New Orleans and sitting outside of New Orleans in Texas and other places, wanting to come home, could not help but have felt left out, forgotten, disregarded, listening to the President talk about the State of the Union.

What is the State of the Union? What is the state of the Gulf Coast that suffered that awful catastrophe and all of that disaster? And the President of the United States didn't even mention it. I know they felt terrible about that and wondering who cares. Who cares about their future and getting them back into their homes and jobs and getting their schools and their healthcare system up? It was a terrible -- not mentioned by the President of the United States.

With Democrats now in control, Bush no longer has the last word. So, on Monday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will hold a field hearing in New Orleans to find out what's going on with the recovery efforts.

The hearing will begin at 9 am CST. For info on witnesses and location, click here.

State of Our Union

It wasn’t easy but I watched President Bush’s State of the Union address.

I watched it at Marble Collegiate Church following a community dialogue organized by Generation Engage. Using Apple iChat the conversation was broadened to include young activists in Richmond, Va., and Raleigh, N.C.

The conversation was led by former presidential speechwriters Ted Sorenson and William Safire.

As befitting two “people of the word,” the banter between Sorenson and Safire was lively, informative and provocative, particularly when Safire likened Bush to Harry Truman.

Safire on Bush:

One of the best things about Bush is he doesn’t get depressed by poll numbers.

Sorenson had a different take on Bush:

Bush’s address will confirm my thesis that political discourse has declined since John F. Kennedy.

By show time, I was primed for Bush whose Iraq war has put the world in an uproar and “the danger zone is everywhere.”

Bush babbled on that “it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory.”

While Bush may not be depressed, he’s depressing the hell out of war-weary Americans. Unlike the clueless commander in chief, they have “a worried mind” for good reason.

Katrina and Manmade Disasters

Earlier this month, I made a quick visit to New Orleans. Sadly, I can't report that a lot of progress has been made since I was last there.

Police cruisers still block access to the Lower Ninth Ward.  For some unknown reason, Congo Square is now off-limits.

While the lampposts along Canal Street are decked out with Christmas wreaths, the storefronts are mostly vacant. And if the Saints hadn’t played a home game, downtown and the French Quarter would have been even more desolate.

The current issue of Poverty & Race includes a reprint of Robert A. Bullard’s “Katrina and the Second Disaster: A Twenty-Point Plan to Destroy Black New Orleans.”

Dr. Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, posits there is a “’second disaster’ in the making – driven by racism, classism, elitism, paternalism and old-fashioned greed.”

Old-fashioned greed led to the displacement of African American workers by cheap illegal immigrant laborers.  An unintended consequence of the “second disaster” is adding to the stress of beleaguered Katrina survivors.  As the New York Times reported:

In the latest twist to the demographic transformation of New Orleans since it was swamped by Hurricane Katrina last year, hundreds of babies are being born to Latino immigrant workers, both legal and illegal, who flocked to the city to toil on its reconstruction.

The throng of babies gurgling in the handful of operational maternity wards here has come as a big surprise — and a financial strain — to this historically black and white city, which before the hurricane had only a small Latino community and virtually no experience of illegal immigration.

“Of all the myriad things that have changed after Katrina, this wasn’t high on anybody’s priority list,” said Dr. Mark Peters, chief executive of East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie.

Because many immigrant mothers cannot afford to pay for prenatal care or delivery services, New Orleans’s newest citizens are adding an unexpected load to the decimated health infrastructure in a city abandoned by many of its doctors. Much of the state-financed Charity Hospital system, which before Hurricane Katrina provided the bulk of care to New Orleans’s uninsured and indigent population, remains closed.

The unending manmade disasters raise the question: How will black folks survive FEMA, HUD -- and a flood of illegal aliens and anchor babies?

A Banner Day

Yesterday should have been declared "David Banner Day" in Jackson, Miss.

Banner, a gangsta rapper, turned the tables on his critics in the media who questioned why the National Black Caucus of State Legislators would honor him at its Youth Congress luncheon.

Banner ripped the MSM for ignoring his Hurricane Katrina relief efforts that raised a million dollars; money that he "brought back to Mississippi."

Mind you, I'm no fan of gangsta rap but I love blues and its double entendres. It's the height of hypocrisy for elders to denounce Banner's lyrics while at the same time get their groove on to the raunchy lyrics of Bobby Rush, another Jackson native.

Banner told a roomful of bright black high school students who whooped and hollered as he walked to the podium:

We are gangsta because the establishment and the situation we live in in Mississippi is gangsta... Critics focus on the lyrics rather than the circumstances in our neighborhoods.

Banner encouraged the kids to "be gangsta about your school work." He pointedly asked his critics:

Where were you when I was passing out boxes standing in water. Where were you? You were not there. Regardless of what people say and do, I'm in the hood...Gangsta rappers are raising your kids because you didn't.

Teach.

Katrina: Art Not Just for Art’s Sake

Last week, Rep. Gene Taylor, chair of the Democratic Caucus Katrina Task Force, released a report, “Katrina and Beyond,” which includes recommendations for legislative action to bolster hurricane rebuilding and recovery efforts.

Rep. Taylor’s news conference was aired live on C-SPAN. If any Katrina survivors were watching, I hope that they were heartened knowing that they have not been forgotten – at least not by House Democrats (and here).

While the mainstream media have largely moved on, artists are telling the story of survival, loss and hope in film, on stage (and here) and in photographs (here and here).

Over the weekend, I viewed a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photographer Robert Polidori went to New Orleans to “bear witness to the stunning scope of the crisis and to ensure that New Orleans and its citizens will not be forgotten.”  His hauntingly beautiful photographs capture the “poignancy of absence.”

Polidor's photographs will be on view until Dec. 10, 2006. For more info, click here.