Both felt that the city of New Orleans was not only not helping, but clearly trying to drive people out of the Lower Ninth while maintaining a PR faà §ade. Consequently a lot of Common Ground's efforts are in the legal arena, educating residents about and protecting them from government and private business ill-intent and dishonesty. A hotline was created for residents to report police corruption and brutality.
Jesse himself explained how he had been cold-cocked and beaten up by five of New Orleans' finest after he accidentally wandered into a melee that the police were starting to break up. Jesse explained how there was really a terrific community fellowship and an old, old culture in the Lower Ninth Ward. Generation after generation of families have lived here and everybody on a street knows everybody else. So what a compound tragedy it will be if this community is not revived.
I asked about the levee system, because I had noted how low it looked to me. Jesse anecdotally described how if one is a good jumper, you can stretch your arm up, leap up and barely touch the top of the levee in certain places. Not very encouraging. That is why, ultimately, New Orleans needs an entirely new engineering project to offer this invaluable city flood and surge protection to suit the challenges of the 21st Century. But that would take a massive New Deal Era TVA-style project, something totally beyond the thinking and capability of the atomistic, corporate-minded Bush Administration.Â
To add injury to insult regarding the levees, Jesse and Dan conveyed how Mississippi River cruise ship lines were attempting to build docking facilities on the far northern end of the Lower Ninth on a natural hurricane barrier called the Cypress Triangle. This would destroy much of this natural defense against flooding and put residents at even greater risk. To compound matters, they also want to construct dangerous and garish high-voltage towers in the ward, an example of the utter callousness and folly of corporations untethered from social needs. The Army Corps of Engineers' proffered advice to residents in light of all the above is: Put your houses on stilts.Â
Returning to Friday afternoon timewise, after talking to volunteers, I hopped back in my car and drove over to the southside to survey the damage there. I saw much of the same, but with less destructive intensity, and there were more signs of life, functioning houses here and there, neighbors talking, more cars and trucks driving about, so this was a hopeful sign of progress.Â
By now it was late afternoon with the sun low on the horizon, so I slowly turned back onto N. Claiborne Avenue and up and over the draw bridge, headed for a look at the French Quarter, which I soon discovered looks completely recovered from Katrina, a stark, stark contrast to what I had just witnessed. Â
I left the Lower Ninth Ward with competing emotions flowing through me. On the one hand, the enormity of the destruction was unnerving and depressing. On the other hand, the spirit of love, selfless service and dedication among the volunteers I met was absolutely inspiring. If this spirit is contagious enough to spread throughout America, then New Orleans and the Lower Ninth will survive and flourish. But if the current paradigm of privatization, "halliburtonization" as some call it, prevails down here, then the Devil will get his due.
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