Who Are the Victims?
When all is said and done, who will be the final victims of Katrina and Rita?
Surely not the governor of Louisiana, whose desire for political power was stronger than her desire to save the lives of the very people who put her sorry ass in office.
Surely not the mayor of New Orleans, who was just not up to the task of telling the people of New Orleans that certain death was headed their way if they did not evacuate. His reluctance, (indeed everyone's reluctance) to tell the brutal honest truth, "if it hits New Orleans, we will flood and many of you will die!", will forever be remembered by those who lost loved ones in the storm.
The final victims of these storms will be the same people who couldn't afford to flee, and the people who couldn't afford to leave their property unprotected and ripe for the looters' pickings.
Or maybe the victims will be the residents of Holly Beach, Cameron, Hackberry,orVermillion Parish whose homes simply vanished in the night, sliding out and away from the Louisiana coast amid the howling winds and crashing surf.
The people of Louisiana are the victims. Our city of culture and beauty destroyed, our coastline smacked flat, our refineries crippled. We will become the desert of the south. No more "Sportman's Paradise" after these hurricanes. Gas is already difficult to procure and costly when you do. The cost of living in this state will be outrageous.
For an outsider, it is incomprehensible to understand that such a huge part of our population is supported by the oil market. Almost every family here in Southwest Louisiana has at least one family member who works offshore. Many, many offshore rigs were lost in the combination of both storms. Where will all of these people from these rigs find employment?
New Orleans was the largest healthcare provider in the state. LSU, Tulane, Charity, Memorial...all of these thriving medical systems are shut down. Their doctors and nurses scattered to the winds, their patients unable to locate them. Think about it-cancer patients, heart patients, dialysis patients, immune disorder patients......none of these people can just walk in to a new doctor's office and say, "continue my treatment". Because, in many cases, their records and treatment plans are destroyed by water or deemed human health hazards due to their exposure to the toxic mold now growing in every wet buidling in New Orleans. These people are the unseen victims. Will some of them die? Maybe. Will some of them get sicker? Probably. The standard wait time for getting on the new patients list for the doctors who are actuallly taking new patients is four to six weeks. That's a long time for a sick person to linger without supervision, sometimes without medication.
It will take a long time to clean and refurbish those hospitals....if they even re-open Some of them may close their doors forever. Think about how hard it will be to start up again! How will they acquire staff to work in a city that just lost a huge section of housing? Where will they live?Where will their patient base come from?
What happens to the many, many federally funded health studies being performed in New Orleans? Their sujects/patients? Well, maybe there's about 150 of them now living in Houston, 75 in San Antonio, 45 in Memphis, 13 in Washington D.C., 3 in Kokomo, 6 in Denver, 9 in Little Rock....... Many of the studies have been ongoing for years, some since the 1970's. All that time, effort, progress, and money....in the name of helping humans.....down the proverbial drain. (Or better yet, over the levee.)
And now, one month after Katrina, are things any more organized than the first week? Blanco and Nagin complained about FEMA and Charlie Brown. Well okay, Brown is gone, Fema is busting butt, and things are not much more organised.
If you were a patient of an LSU facility in NewOrleans, save yourself a lot of trouble and move away, find another doctor, and pretend you never lived here. There is NO way of finding your doctors. Call the LSU hotline and give them your name, number and doctor(s)' names....do it every day for a week, two weeks, a month. Hell, do it forever. Try and get a response from them. Look on LSU's website. They have taken care of all of the students who pay the outlandish tuition, making sure they are housed and placed accordingly, especially medical students. (BIG tuition check, future donor!) But for patients who need healthcare from their LSU doctors, call the Hotline. Yeah. Right. No one has yet to find one patient who has been contacted back from the Hotline.
Now for patients whose physicians were a member of "Tenet" healthcare system, you guys have hit the motherlode! They will e-mail you, and follow up with a phone call, even if you are not e member of their healthcare sytem. They are finding LSU doctors for LSU patients! Imagine that! Tenet is the real deal!
No information on how Tulane patients are faring, but they do have a good website which seems to be organised.
And now for some more hidden victims...people in the small towns of Louisiana whose houses were crushed, electricity system destroyed, possessions lost, and with no fuel to flee! You see, it is not exciting for CNN and Fox News to cover these small insignificant towns. Not enough drama there for Geraldo. These people live and breathe today because of the kindness of others. Until and unless FEMA declares your parish a disaster area, you will get nothing. NOTHING. Doesn't matter if your roof flew away and all your possessions swirled away to OZ ...if you can find your insurance company...that's it. BUT....in many cases, the insurance company was destroyed, the insurance people evacuated to god-knows-where, and your policy with the company name and numbers for the main office flew away with your roof. Sure, you should have taken the insurance papers with you, but if the federal government and the state didn't see fit to order a mandatory evacuation of your city, then you figured it was a pretty safe bet to stay behind and hide in the closet while your belongings blew away with the roof. When and if you get phone service back, try and call any of the hotlines and you will find that help is limited if the Feds think your area is not "devastated" enough. (Enough with the word "devastated". It has been overused until it hardly stirs the sympathy nerve of a church lady.)
And a big Thank you and hello goes out to all of the helicopter rescue crews who picked up children, leaving their parents behind, thereby creating the largest missing child situation in the history of the modern world. Not since the Pied Piper have so many children just vanished into the woodwork! What is the rationale in taking seven children on a helicopter and leaving three mothers behind. (Sure, it is their fault for having so damn many kids.) And then, let's just take those seven kids and drop them off at the drop site and, instead of going straight back to rescue their mothers, let's just wander down another street and see if anybody else needs a lift. Someone will surely find all seven children wandering the streets, supervised only by the oldest child in the group, four- year -old Devonte. (Yes! True story.) Who the hell was in charge of THAT situation?
Another shout out to the idiots who chose to drop that race card on the table, effectively directing attention away from the people who needed help! Special kudos to the morons who don't know that the Ninth Ward is about 85% WHITE. So, the "bomb the levee to get rid of black people" theory just doesn't wash. IT JUST DOES NOT WASH!!!!!!! But hey, you wanna play that game, play it.
And black or white, looting is looting, whatever the motive, whatever the skin color. That doesn't mean these people weren't justified in looting, it just means that they ALL were looters. Their social mores changed drastically during four days of filth and starvation....survival of the fittest meant "looting to live". So be it.
But hey, make it easy on yourself and blame the president. Yeah, George Bush. THE SAME GEORGE BUSH WHO BEGGED BLANCO TO EVACUATE NEW ORLEANS ON FRIDAY, BUT SHE SAID NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Props to all of you idiots for royally fucking up my beautiful home state. I have always had the feeling that the rest of the U.S. considered Louisiana useless. I was right. Do think that if an apocalyptic event occurred in ANY other major city in the union, that ANYONE would dare to suggest, "Let's not rebuild it"? Never! "But it is below sea level", they lament. Well, it seems to me that there is a major fault line in California with large cities on it, so it is inevitable that they will suffer severe, if not catastrophic damages one day. Do you think it will be suggested that they not rebuild? Au contraire! I think not!
Beasely Dog has finished barking for the day. Feel free to bark back.
When all is said and done, who will be the final victims of Katrina and Rita?
Surely not the governor of Louisiana, whose desire for political power was stronger than her desire to save the lives of the very people who put her sorry ass in office.
Surely not the mayor of New Orleans, who was just not up to the task of telling the people of New Orleans that certain death was headed their way if they did not evacuate. His reluctance, (indeed everyone's reluctance) to tell the brutal honest truth, "if it hits New Orleans, we will flood and many of you will die!", will forever be remembered by those who lost loved ones in the storm.
The final victims of these storms will be the same people who couldn't afford to flee, and the people who couldn't afford to leave their property unprotected and ripe for the looters' pickings.
Or maybe the victims will be the residents of Holly Beach, Cameron, Hackberry,orVermillion Parish whose homes simply vanished in the night, sliding out and away from the Louisiana coast amid the howling winds and crashing surf.
The people of Louisiana are the victims. Our city of culture and beauty destroyed, our coastline smacked flat, our refineries crippled. We will become the desert of the south. No more "Sportman's Paradise" after these hurricanes. Gas is already difficult to procure and costly when you do. The cost of living in this state will be outrageous.
For an outsider, it is incomprehensible to understand that such a huge part of our population is supported by the oil market. Almost every family here in Southwest Louisiana has at least one family member who works offshore. Many, many offshore rigs were lost in the combination of both storms. Where will all of these people from these rigs find employment?
New Orleans was the largest healthcare provider in the state. LSU, Tulane, Charity, Memorial...all of these thriving medical systems are shut down. Their doctors and nurses scattered to the winds, their patients unable to locate them. Think about it-cancer patients, heart patients, dialysis patients, immune disorder patients......none of these people can just walk in to a new doctor's office and say, "continue my treatment". Because, in many cases, their records and treatment plans are destroyed by water or deemed human health hazards due to their exposure to the toxic mold now growing in every wet buidling in New Orleans. These people are the unseen victims. Will some of them die? Maybe. Will some of them get sicker? Probably. The standard wait time for getting on the new patients list for the doctors who are actuallly taking new patients is four to six weeks. That's a long time for a sick person to linger without supervision, sometimes without medication.
It will take a long time to clean and refurbish those hospitals....if they even re-open Some of them may close their doors forever. Think about how hard it will be to start up again! How will they acquire staff to work in a city that just lost a huge section of housing? Where will they live?Where will their patient base come from?
What happens to the many, many federally funded health studies being performed in New Orleans? Their sujects/patients? Well, maybe there's about 150 of them now living in Houston, 75 in San Antonio, 45 in Memphis, 13 in Washington D.C., 3 in Kokomo, 6 in Denver, 9 in Little Rock....... Many of the studies have been ongoing for years, some since the 1970's. All that time, effort, progress, and money....in the name of helping humans.....down the proverbial drain. (Or better yet, over the levee.)
And now, one month after Katrina, are things any more organized than the first week? Blanco and Nagin complained about FEMA and Charlie Brown. Well okay, Brown is gone, Fema is busting butt, and things are not much more organised.
If you were a patient of an LSU facility in NewOrleans, save yourself a lot of trouble and move away, find another doctor, and pretend you never lived here. There is NO way of finding your doctors. Call the LSU hotline and give them your name, number and doctor(s)' names....do it every day for a week, two weeks, a month. Hell, do it forever. Try and get a response from them. Look on LSU's website. They have taken care of all of the students who pay the outlandish tuition, making sure they are housed and placed accordingly, especially medical students. (BIG tuition check, future donor!) But for patients who need healthcare from their LSU doctors, call the Hotline. Yeah. Right. No one has yet to find one patient who has been contacted back from the Hotline.
Now for patients whose physicians were a member of "Tenet" healthcare system, you guys have hit the motherlode! They will e-mail you, and follow up with a phone call, even if you are not e member of their healthcare sytem. They are finding LSU doctors for LSU patients! Imagine that! Tenet is the real deal!
No information on how Tulane patients are faring, but they do have a good website which seems to be organised.
And now for some more hidden victims...people in the small towns of Louisiana whose houses were crushed, electricity system destroyed, possessions lost, and with no fuel to flee! You see, it is not exciting for CNN and Fox News to cover these small insignificant towns. Not enough drama there for Geraldo. These people live and breathe today because of the kindness of others. Until and unless FEMA declares your parish a disaster area, you will get nothing. NOTHING. Doesn't matter if your roof flew away and all your possessions swirled away to OZ ...if you can find your insurance company...that's it. BUT....in many cases, the insurance company was destroyed, the insurance people evacuated to god-knows-where, and your policy with the company name and numbers for the main office flew away with your roof. Sure, you should have taken the insurance papers with you, but if the federal government and the state didn't see fit to order a mandatory evacuation of your city, then you figured it was a pretty safe bet to stay behind and hide in the closet while your belongings blew away with the roof. When and if you get phone service back, try and call any of the hotlines and you will find that help is limited if the Feds think your area is not "devastated" enough. (Enough with the word "devastated". It has been overused until it hardly stirs the sympathy nerve of a church lady.)
And a big Thank you and hello goes out to all of the helicopter rescue crews who picked up children, leaving their parents behind, thereby creating the largest missing child situation in the history of the modern world. Not since the Pied Piper have so many children just vanished into the woodwork! What is the rationale in taking seven children on a helicopter and leaving three mothers behind. (Sure, it is their fault for having so damn many kids.) And then, let's just take those seven kids and drop them off at the drop site and, instead of going straight back to rescue their mothers, let's just wander down another street and see if anybody else needs a lift. Someone will surely find all seven children wandering the streets, supervised only by the oldest child in the group, four- year -old Devonte. (Yes! True story.) Who the hell was in charge of THAT situation?
Another shout out to the idiots who chose to drop that race card on the table, effectively directing attention away from the people who needed help! Special kudos to the morons who don't know that the Ninth Ward is about 85% WHITE. So, the "bomb the levee to get rid of black people" theory just doesn't wash. IT JUST DOES NOT WASH!!!!!!! But hey, you wanna play that game, play it.
And black or white, looting is looting, whatever the motive, whatever the skin color. That doesn't mean these people weren't justified in looting, it just means that they ALL were looters. Their social mores changed drastically during four days of filth and starvation....survival of the fittest meant "looting to live". So be it.
But hey, make it easy on yourself and blame the president. Yeah, George Bush. THE SAME GEORGE BUSH WHO BEGGED BLANCO TO EVACUATE NEW ORLEANS ON FRIDAY, BUT SHE SAID NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Props to all of you idiots for royally fucking up my beautiful home state. I have always had the feeling that the rest of the U.S. considered Louisiana useless. I was right. Do think that if an apocalyptic event occurred in ANY other major city in the union, that ANYONE would dare to suggest, "Let's not rebuild it"? Never! "But it is below sea level", they lament. Well, it seems to me that there is a major fault line in California with large cities on it, so it is inevitable that they will suffer severe, if not catastrophic damages one day. Do you think it will be suggested that they not rebuild? Au contraire! I think not!
Beasely Dog has finished barking for the day. Feel free to bark back.
posted by Beasely | 12:19 PM
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