new orleans

if you have to ask why new orleans should be saved, then you just don't get it! and if you don't get it, stop reading this, go turn on american idol(the show that got more people to vote for their contestants than turned out to vote for the president), and keep sleepwalking through the rest of your life. you think it is fool hardy to build a city in a flood plain? perhaps, go tell that to new york city because most of it is either at or below sea level. you think new york doesn't have to worry about hurricanes? think again. they have been hit in the past and they will be hit again by a storm in the future. it is a waiting game just like the one new orleans plays every storm season when we hunker down in white knuckled fear during the dangerous days of summer. clue in! this was no natural disaster. this wasn't an act of god. it was stupidity, plain and simple. the government installed faulty levees. they broke it and they should fix it. if i wreck your car, you would expect me to pay for it, right? right! either we are an american city or we are not and sometimes it is hard to tell around here. five fucking days! it took five fucking days for the so called richest nation on earth to save its own citizens from the watery hell that it created in the first damn place. hell, maybe shrub couldn't find new orleans on a map. we all know he had no idea where afghanistan was prior to our invading it. hey, miss teen carolina, get that boy a map.
i hear people talking about katrina fatigue, like the rest of the country would like to move on...yeh, so would we. you know that we are not even suffering fom post traumatic stress disorder here because in order for that to happen, the stress has to actually end. here it just goes on and on and on. people still don't have any money to get back into their homes because the road home is a joke, only we aren't laughing. so these poor people sit in tiny white boxes that out gas chemicals and poison them in their sleep, provided the damn thing doesn't just catch on fire and burn them to death, which has happened. we have a health care crisis that is third world in its scope, even as we lead the nation in depression and our murder/suicide rates climb. you think you are sick of katrina, well i got news for you, so are we.
say america, i have a proposition for you. next august 29th, pull the cord to the power grid and plunge the nation into darkness for five days in memory of what happened to this, my city. shut off the water to every structure from the east to the west coast. no televisions. no radios. no x-boxes. nothing but the blackness that stalks its way in like a monster from a horror movie. don't drink any water and don't eat any food for five days. periodically, open up your fridge and sniff the rotting contents of the interior, even more foul than the smell of your own body five days without a shower. then sit down calm with yourself and imagine if it were for real. your on your roof. the water is lapping at the shingles and it is a black water, full of oil and god knows what. imagine not knowing if friends and family are alive. imagine the heat and the sun drilling its way into your brain as each day ticks by with no water. imagine the dead all around you. the stench. the helplessness and hopelessness. imagine what the man; who jumped from the i-10 to his death below, was thinking as his feet left the pavement. imagine what it is like to be forgotten. then maybe just maybe, you will know what it means to be from new orleans.