“The Florida Everglades are not connected to the Gulf like we are here. They’re surrounded by beach hard coastline. They actually have rocks, but we don’t, because everything here was built by the river. This is all black jack mud that was all sediment. It’s a different scenario then they have. There are a lot more reasons to fix this than to fix that [the Everglades]. Look at the culture, the music, and the food [here].”
Oil Well in Sugar Cane Field (Credit keith harmon snow)
English as a Second Language
“Here we [Cajuns] were forced to speak English. If you go to Lafayette and everything, Lafayette and that area west still speaks French and they keep French important. Here, my grandparents didn’t learn English in school. Everything was totally French here. They learned English from Texaco. Texaco bought 70% of [Terrebonne] Parish; they were kind of forced into learning English and changing their ways of living. As far as I’m concerned, that’s when the culture started dying, right there. It was stripped away for industry purposes. [6]
“Which is kind of aggravating with me [and] a lot of people is that you see Spanish going up everywhere and people are allowed to speak Spanish and actually have TV and billboards and they’re trying to get us to learn Spanish, instead of trying to make those people conform to English like they made us conform.
"We were real Americans down here. This is where the French people came and mixed with the Indian people, before the thirteen colonies, this was already going on down here. This was the real melting pot. This town was not founded by Acadians from Canada; this town was founded by French people from France, who came here and mixed and lived with Indian people. That’s my heritage: French and Indian. I mean, that’s as American as you’re going to get. Here’s Europeans coming in and mixing with the natives, not taking it over, not killing them, not forcing them out of their place, but living with them. [7]
“To force Americans to speak English but allow the Mexicans or Spanish to come in and try to get us conform to their language doesn’t seem right at all. Sometimes I think this country does things totally backwards. And I would love to see that change because we all want to believe that we’re the best country on the planet, but right now it’s very hard to believe that. I think we do have the ability to do that, I think that the founding fathers had a good idea, but it wasn’t carried through.”
Warning from the Founding Fathers
“All of the things that they talked about when they were forming this form of government that we live under, they warned us about these times, about giving up freedom for security. They warned us about being afraid and letting fear run your decision-making in your country. They warned us about allowing corporations and industry to get bigger and more powerful than government itself. It’s happening right now. Oil is more powerful than government, and we’re afraid of terrorism, so we’ll give up all of the freedoms that we can to try to make it seem like we’re safe, when we’re definitely not safer than we were before. If anything, we’re more vulnerable than we were before 9/11.
“Showing the pictures that they showed during Katrina, where it took five days for the military to get to New Orleans, did not do us any justice according to the rest of this world and how they view our security forces.
“The people that we’re fighting [in Iraq] have hardened bunkers with permanently mounted guns in all of their cities. We don’t have any of that. Everything that we have is mobile. And most of it is [in] another country right now. The security thing and this terrorism thing is killing us. This was huge, what just happened with this veto override [of the Water Act]. [8]
“That’s the first time in history that that’s happened. How can anybody not see what just happened? Here is a water bill, which we’re included in. It’s all about managing rivers better because all of the rivers in this country need to be managed, and as a result Atlanta is about to run out of water. There’s already a town in Tennessee that only gets water for three hours per day, because they got no river water coming through there. They got rivers in the vicinity, but they’re not able to use them.
“This Water Act is supposed to help all of this. This is pertinent, going on right now and the president is saying I’m vetoing it. Give me 200 billion for Iraq, and I’m vetoing everything else. Everything in this country, the bridge in Minneapolis, that’s a federal government owned bridge, that’s not Minneapolis’ bridge. They didn’t even have a plan to fix that, for months. Because all of the money and concern is in Iraq. That’s about the biggest case of mismanagement I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m not an expert on management, but I don’t have to be. If the president is going to sit there and tell you, I’m going to veto everything that runs across my desk, even if it helps this country, I’m vetoing it, because I need 200 billion dollars for Iraq. And I have to give it up for the people in Congress to actually step up and override the thing [veto of Water Act]. It at least shows that some things in our constitution are still in place.
“How can we say we’re the greatest country in the world when you see the Governor of Georgia saying Atlanta has 80 days of water left, and we’ve got no solution? With all of the scientists that we have in this country, and all of this technology and all of the advances that we make, we can’t get water to a city that has a river flowing not too far from the city? There is water there.
“If you’re the president, or the leader of a country, that’s what you’d be doing. If you were really the leader of a country, that’s what you would do. You would find a way to speed up the process. The president is the only one that has the ability to speed up the process. That’s his job. That’s his description in the constitution. The president is the people’s voice in Congress. So Congress has all of these rules they have to follow, and all of these procedural things they have to follow, but the president can break the procedure when it’s necessary to help his people. He has that power. He has not used it [to help people].
“They taught us, the president is your voice, he’s the peoples guy. I remember in elementary school, they taught us how to write letters to the president, and we wrote letters to the White House. Because they wanted us to understand that that door was open and here is how easy it is to use it. Well where is it? Why aren’t we doing it? Why isn’t it working? I’ve been very hard on people, encouraging them to get involved. You live in the system. As far as the constitution goes, you are the system. You are the voice. You are the power. You have to exercise and see if it works. If what we’re doing in Iraq… I’m just telling you from what we’re told… we’re in Iraq trying to turn them into a democracy, trying to make them be more like the good old U.S.
