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A Refugee Camp on I-10
I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.
In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them.
This is the beginning of an article by Jordan Flaherty, Notes from Inside New Orleans, that has been published in dozens of websites all over the internet. It is revealing and scary. Flaherty writes for the "Left Turn" a somewhat radical leftist magazine that calls looters survivors. Others call them criminals, bogey men. So many people are saying such different things that only one fact remains clear: 30 to 40% of New Orleans citizens lived below the poverty line. How is this possible in the US?