More New Orleans
The other day, I read an article in the Observer, which quotes someone who says that, in the convention centre, people were taking guns to defend themselves:
>’…The police kept telling us buses were coming but they didn’t. People started getting aggravated and then one policeman got mad, he caught an attitude with somebody and they caught an attitude back and started banging on his car, and that’s how it started. He called for back-up and the next thing I know the military are down there throwing stun grenades. Everybody started running, bumping into each other, hurting each other.’
>As the repeated promises of buses failed to materialise, people in the shelters started stealing cars. ‘How do you expect people to act right when they’re starving to death?’ asked Williams. ‘There were bodies all over. We were just throwing them out the front. They (the authorities) are blaming it on the people, making it look like it was the people’s fault, but it’s really their fault because they’re not giving us what we need to survive. So now people are going and getting guns in order to fight back, in order to survive cos they don’t want to help us.’
Another article from the Guardian describes the looters as heroes:
>But to the people inside the convention centre, he was one of a band of heroes keeping them alive. “The people who were going into the stores would give us water and food, said Edna Harris, Henry Carr’s aunt. “There would be ladies with babies and they had no milk, and these guys would break in and bring them milk.”
Also a great article, by Mike Davis, written after a hurricane in New Orleans in 2004.
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Home boy, you’ve got a stray ” at the end of the final link in this post. It’s an interesting article, btw.
Comment by Stefan @ 9/8/2005 2:46 am