8 Feet High and Risin'

OR:

The Big Uneasy

I have mixed emotions about what's going on in New Orleans right now. Actually I have a lot more sympathy for other parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama than I do NO. The people in those other parts lost just as much, but the big easy is more photogenic. Also, the Rat-bastard freaks have created a news story by looting & pillaging there.
Now, before you jump all over me about this, I've been there... on a smaller scale, but there.
I lived in Greenville, NC durring the Floyd flood. The whole city was cut off for several days. Luckily only one person drowned in G-ville, but Tarboro, Princeville and other areas lost plenty. They died in attics, in cars, on roofs and much more.
I lived on the corner of Jarvis and Avery. My house was one of the few to not be lost to the Tar River.
7am Friday morning I was helping a woman (my neighbor across the street) move out of her house because she woke up and found 2 inches of water in her bedroom. It came up through the night. By lunch we were wading through waist deep river water in her front hall and all the houses behind her were already lost.
I knew my house was in the line of fire, but I lived on a small hill, so all my other neighbors came first. Sure my house was spared, but I didn't know that then. After everyone else was taken care of My buddy Sean and I cleared out my house into a truck owned by the furniture store where we worked.
Power was out so all the grocery stores sold their frozen foods for 25-50 cents per item. Kind of the opposite of price gouging. Everyone pulled together to help, almost no-one whined or cried about govenment assistance, only about personal loss... and there was plenty of that.
Every time the flood pictures hit the TV I can still smell that smell. That rotten vegetation/mud and muck/dead fish smell.
I grew up in North Carolina, so hurricanes scare me very little. I've seen Hugo and Andrew. Lived through Fran in the Carribean then watched it smash through Raleigh on TV. (Very surreal since I'd just moved from RDU.) I even heard my mom and dad tell stories about Hazel in (what year? '54?)
Hell, when I was a teenager I surfed for a little while an my pals and I would stap our boards to the roof of a car and head for the coast. (It was the only way to get good waves in Carolina.) I love a good storm.
Then I hear the Mayor of N'orlins crying about government assistance, and see pictures of 200 busses underwater Three miles from the place where everyone was stranded. The Governor of LA decrying federal delays when the National Guard is (formost) under state control. I hear screams and crys of racisim from people running out of a Walmart with a plasma screen TV in a city with no power. Help us, Help us, but stand still too long and find yourself in the crosshairs of a stolen firearm. (don't worry, I've got plenty on this for all you gun-fearing-wusies at a later time)
Some of the looting I get. In the same circumstance food, fuel, and dry clothes are a must, and that includes diapers. If I didn't already own several firearms and I saw the city disentegrating like that, yeah, I'd probably even arm myself.
The footage of the police officers, with a shopping cart, looting Walmart- I don't fucking think so. I hope they send you to jail. I wish they could make you wear a badge on your state issue... I hear prison is a really, really bad place to be if you were a cop.
Sure, maybe the feds and FEMA took a while to get going. This was a big operation, they couldn't be sitting right on you, they didn't know the outcome ahead of time. Your local government however did know you lived in a city below sea level. They did order a mandetory evacuation then took few steps to implement it, not to mention those of you who stayed by choice.
The rest of the country and your rescuers and the unarmed victims are SOOO glad you could make it easy on them by shooting at helecoptors, and engineers... by raping and stealing and all the other violence... by making sure what wasn't destroyed by the storm was defaced in the aftermath. Oh, yeah, and making sure to blame outside third parties for all the suffering.
That just makes all the sympathy I might have had evaporate.