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September 9, 2005

And You Wonder Why The Police Were Shot At in New Orleans

By Rob Kall

::::::::

There are several reports that suburban police in Gretna, across the bridge from New Orleans, fired guns in the face of groups of people who tried to leave New Orleans.

Rogers Cadenhead reports, in an article on his website:
As the situation grew steadily worse in New Orleans last week, you might have wondered why people didn't just leave on foot. The Louisiana Superdome is less than two miles from a bridge that leads over the Mississippi River out of the city.

The answer: Any crowd that tried to do so was met by suburban police, some of whom fired guns to disperse the group and seized their water.

Around 500 people stuck in downtown New Orleans after the storm banded together for self-preservation, making sure the oldest and youngest among them were taken care of before looking after their own needs.


Then, the last few days, on TV, we see big tough cops dragging people out of their homes. Some of the people are saying they will shoot rather than be taken from their homes. Today, we see a very frail, elderly woman chased and thrown down, then grabbed by a hulking storm trooper. This is a horror story for both the woman and the policeman who is trying to do his job “rescuing” her as he’s been ordered.

It will be interesting to see if this three or five second image of a frail old woman being manhandled will be shown repeatedly by the media. It is so much more moving and shocking than the Howard Dean exuberance moment that the networks played so many times.

But the first story is the most horrific, for there was no interest in rescue. These subhuman police could very well have sent the escaping victims of the flood back to their deaths. Imagine being the son or grandson of a senior citizen stricken by the heat, the dehydration and seeing more police coming for you, after you’ve been shot at by men wearing uniforms who should be behind bars. It might make you think about protecting yourself from the police.

There are thousands of good guys- police, national guardsmen, firemen, all kinds of rescue workers with good intentions. But then there was that handful of Gretna cops who showed the world how low a person can go and gave hundreds, if not thousands of New Orleans Levee Flood victims reasons to not trust, to fear and even defend themselves from the police.

These bad apples should not just be fired. They should be tried and convicted and put in the local state prison with the general prison population. They’ll find justice there. .

Here’s the phone number and address for the
Gretna Police Department. Let them know what you think of them.
200 5th St
Gretna, Louisiana 70053
(504)363-1700


Bottom line… people shouldn’t shoot at police. But when police go bad, it reverberates in horrible ways through society. When chaos reigns and people find themselves swirling in the grip of catastrophe, it is understandable and tragic that they respond to rescuers with fear and aggression. When the leaders of the government set examples of untrustworthiness and failure to lead, with death and destruction raining down on the innocent, then THE PEOPLE are left in an incredibly vulnerable situation, and there’s no telling what desperate, vulnerable people will do in response to people wearng uniforms, when they’ve been shot at them before.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.


Check out his platform at RobKall.com


He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity


He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com


more detailed bio:


Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.


Rob Kall Wikipedia Page


Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel


Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel


Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.


Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.


To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.


For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.


Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..


To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.


Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.


His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.


Join the conversation:


On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution


and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation





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