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Indybay Feature

Report-back and thoughts from New Orleans, Jan 30, 2005

by The Project / Jordan Freeman (projectcollective [at] riseup.net)
Report-back and thoughts from New Orleans, Jan 30, 2005
Downing some stale ground-score coffee to write this, On the edge of the ninth ward, where neglected domesticity blends with hurricane Katrina wreckage, watermarked cars frozen in time mark the boundary between rich and poor.

The southern stereotype of rusted cars sitting awkwardly on front-lawns was not meant for this kind of devastation. In some places, five-plus months after something broke the levees, engulfing the city in a man-made lake of sludge and debris, it is hard to tell if the cars overturned or placed cleanly atop each other are sitting on somebody’s front lawn, or instead, in the middle of what used to be their living room, where they watched newscasts saying everything was going to be O.K. until just a Few days before the storm made landfall.

The evacuation order, for those without gas money or with only a bicycle to get to work in the French quarter, came about five days too late. And yes, people were shooting at helicopters, after five days invisible on black tar or asbestos roofs, five days watching them fly past faster than the bodies floating by in the water below.

What will become of New Orleans? For the living, we should speak in the future tense. In one of the oldest cities in the U.S, however, the past is evident like the walled-in graveyards where people were buried above-ground to keep them safe in shifting soil. Houses like empty mausoleums speak only of the past, of work to be done. The French quarter tee

-Jordan Freeman
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