Hope, reality collide in post-Katrina New Orleans

By BECKY BOHRER and PETER PRENGAMAN, Associated Press Writers Becky Bohrer And Peter Prengaman, Associated Press Writers – Wed Aug 26, 7:18 am ET

NEW ORLEANS – Shelia Phillips doesn’t see the New Orleans that Mayor Ray Nagin talks about, the one on its way to having just as many people and a more diverse economy than it did before Hurricane Katrina. How could she?

From the front porch of her house in the devastated Lower 9th Ward, it’s hard to see past the vegetation slowly swallowing the property across the way. Nearby homes are boarded up or still bear the fading tattoos left by search and rescue teams nearly four years ago. The fence around a playground a few blocks down is padlocked.

“I just want to see people again,” she said recently, swatting bugs in the muggy heat.

On paper, the city’s economy appears to be thriving, with relatively low unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy rates. But in post-Katrina New Orleans, residents’ perceptions of their city’s recovery tends to depend on where they live, their vantage point of it. Swaths of some neighborhoods are sparsely populated, even desolate, and federal rebuilding dollars have provided much of the economic resilience.

——Rest of article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200.....ew_orleans

——Seems the writer has trouble not telling the real story, which if you read it completely, states that nobody wants to move back there who has moved away; The people who ARE moving there have never lived there before and that the people who stayed are still waiting for it to drop into their laps.

Note to the military, do NOT recruit actively from New Orleans. You will get lazy, entitlement-minded people who won’t show any initiative.

Also reading into it, the smarter ones moved away, never to return.

I say, make one last final investment to pay for bulldozers, graders, dump trucks, etc and level the rest. Let it be the swamp it started out as and leave it at that.

“Let’s not” says me “Let’s go someplace decent” but I was overruled and off we went. What a dump! It was like landing in Port-Au-Prince. The place smelled of pee, there was garbage everywhere, the drinks were watered and even MacDonald’s needed armed security guards. Worst place I’ve ever been (in America anyway). They should have left it to the alligators, the goddam hellhole.

“the nation’s costliest disaster after the failure of federally built floodwalls…”

And of course the propensity of the “levee boards” to spend their money on anything except levees.

Does anyone remember “Imagine it clean”? It’s hard to believe that a city that needed something like this was in a condition that requires much “rebuilding”.

http://www.allbusiness.com/nor.....372-1.html

If the won had any testicles at all, he would say something like: “And citizens of New Orleans. It’s been tough, I know. But, the time has come, and those of you out there know who you are, to take a lesson from other natural disasters in this nation and get up off your collective asses and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. There is no more money. If you are willing to work hard, pull together and make that city wonderful, I’m all for it and I will send you all the help I can. But so far, all you’ve shown the people of the United States, your fellow citizens, is anger and selfishness about not getting what you think you are owed. Well, life is tough sometimes..and guess what? It’s tougher if you’re stupid”

If Obama said something like that, and backed it up with action, I would vote for him over and over and over again.

But see, that’s where my utopian world and the typical liberal’s differ. No victims, just responsibility. No hand outs, but a hand up. Now, to be fair, there are the elderly, the infirm and handicapped…but I’ll bet many of them aren’t sitting idly by and waiting. Indeed, it has been more often the case that those types of people are better at finding solutions than anything else. Why? Because they have to survive every freakin day. Every single moment is a reminder that they are faced with challenge. And they usually meet it head on and tackle it.

So guess who I’m really talking to—

I make no apology in saying that they should stay in their own backyard and keep their own mess. Or, even better: I might have an ounce of respect for them (as a whole) if they would simply pull together and stop waiting for their entitlement check.

As we used to say in the military, “S__t in one hand and wish in the other. See which one fills up first.”

Explain to me why Kansas and the other states devastated by natural disasters are back in order – could it be the American spirit and lack of gubment dependancy?

So, how much more will all this financial assistance put us further into a monstrous deficit?

In May I was at a dinner with Governor Rick Perry. People asked him when Galveston Island, wiped out by Hurricane Ike, was going to start seeing some rebuilding. Perry got a kind of dark look on his face as he explained how Texas has spent its entire “rainy day” funds on cleaning up Galveston with the promise from the feds that federal disaster funds would be coming to compete the job. Perry went on to explain that he had just recently contacted both FEMA amd Napalitano and asked when Texas could expect the rest funds promised.

Perry was told, flat out, no more funding. It seems that the administration has decided that there are other states that need the help worse since we were not really suffering high unemployment rates (around 6.7% at the time) and that we had a balanced budget. He laughted and told us that the next time a hurricane hits the Texas coast, we should all sit on our roofs and demand the government be responsible for us.

Yeah, this article pisses me off.