I was disgusted and shocked to watch video of armed stormtroopers and
gestapo pointing weapons at innocent Americans.
Their mission: to drag people out of their homes. I remember seeing
clips and hearing about the same thing in nazi germany.
I really hope that people begin fighting back against the nanny state
now a police state. People able to live okay should be left alone. Why
would they want to be penned up with all the animals removed from New
Orleans. I'm saddened to be an American right now.
Your comments are overwrought but I largely agree.
There are parts of New Orleans that are not now and never were flooded. Why
are people being forced to evacuate these areas?
A story on the front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal told of a man
living in Audubon Place (that's a gated street across St. Charles Avenue
from the park). He has running water. He has a generator. He has a
helicopter landing in the park and bringing him food and armed guards to
protect his and his neighbors' houses. I bet they won't make him evacuate:
he knows the right people.
Meanwhile, a woman who owns a restaurant and has it up and working was
forced out, along with her employees, at gunpoint. She thought to be able
to provide food and drink to the workers and the remaining residents, but
the politicians don't want her to do that.
A photo on the front page of today's Washington Post shows two policemen
breaking down the front door of a house. There may have been some flooding
there, but not much. You can tell because there isn't a lot of mud on the
porch floor. The residents evidently locked up their house and evacuated.
Now come the police to trash the place.
It's commonplace in New Orleans for there to be as much as a foot of water
in the streets after a heavy rain. My son's former house on Perrier near
Jefferson Ave (that's south of St. Charles Ave. in an area that was not
flooded by Katrina) had water up to the top of the front steps after one
heavy rain, but no water in the house. Until the 1950s almost all New
Orleans houses were built on crawl spaces a couple of feet high. (If you
haven't guessed, I am a New Orleans native, though I haven't lived there
since I was a teenager.)
My cousin's apartment on the third floor of a building on Gravier between
Carondelet and Baronne (that's right downtown two blocks off of Canal on the
uptown side) is in an area that may have seen water in the streets but not
the buildings. I hope they don't trash his apartment. His son's house in
Lake Vista was never flooded, but a tree blew down on it. He won't be
permitted to fix that. They know about the apartment and the house because
they drove into the city last week in a pickup loaded with plywood and 2x4s
to repair wind damage to the son's office building in Metairie. No water
there, but also no opportunity to carry on his business. He's in commercial
real estate and trying to find office space for his flooded-out or
forced-evacuated clients using a cell phone from a rented house outside
Baton Rouge.
The stupidity of the politicians increases daily. It's as if they are
trying to compensate for their earlier inaction by over reaction now, and
only making bad things worse than they need to be. People forced to leave
dry, safe homes will have nowhere to go. What sense is there in that?
