DISASTER DISPATCHES
(Notes from C.B., CNN Producer)

September 8, 2005
—New Orleans, LA

Out with the US Humane Society in New Orleans East, where it looks as if the area was carpet bombed. The animal situation everywhere is just terrible. Yesterday in St Bernard (to cover nursing home tragedy) I saw tons of dogs, all with collars and tags, running around in packs, scrounging for food and hanging around humans presumably for food and companionship. Many dogs were tied up before their owners evacuated the area. I also saw a dead horse and several who looked malnourished, grazing. Herons, Chicken Hawks, Egrets and other birds are drinking and hanging out in the death water. Have seen horses grazing on a bywater neutral ground recently, too. Pigeons around town are clearly starving as well, no one to feed them. Dead animals are everywhere. Mosquitoes are huge and worse than ever.

The human stories are so searing, yet in some ways this is even more terrible. The animals, which counted on humans to protect them, have been let down and will likely have to be put down or hunted down and shot. It is all just so heartbreaking.

On a more heartening note, I just visited with a woman named Delia LaBarre, in Warehouse District, who refuses to leave. Says the old buildings were built to withstand storms and is willing to rough it in order to preserve the spirit of the city. She said if the city had spent as much time over the past year on an evacuation plan [as it did] worrying about whether the Saints were moving, then many less people would have died. Food for thought.

September 12, 2005
—New Orleans, LA

Went out to New Orleans East. I saw a boat towing three, oozing dead bodies out of a hospital there. I nearly passed out/puked from heat and odor.

At another hospital, formerly known as Baptist now called Memorial, supposedly 45 total are dead inside. I’m hearing that they maxed out the morgue early on and then everyone who was on electric-generated life support died. They stacked bodies in chapel.

While waiting for bodies to be removed I see starving cats and hear wailing and barking dogs, abandoned and locked inside their homes.

I am just sickened on every level.

THE NEW DARK AGES

Last week, a friend wrote me this:

“I keep thinking about all those dystopic novels I've read (Handmaid's Tale, "He, She and It")—this is always how it starts (end days), with cities being wiped out by huge weather patterns (that have come about due to global warming), masses of people dying, phones failing, diseases spreading.”

I replied that we were seeing the “end days.” But, I wasn’t sure if they were going to look like either a Margaret Atwood novel or the apocalypse of the bible. Surely, end of the world I was brought up to live in is occurring. Let me elaborate.

In the 1960s, I assumed that when I was a “grown up,” my world would still resemble the one I saw around me — and the ways it would be different would be improvements on the past. My adult world would have Social Security for the old, housing programs and welfare for the poor, and good, public schools. The vast wealth in the US coffers would assure that health care was available to all, museums were free and children did not go hungry. Racism and sexism would be a thing of the past (not to mention homophobia) and the government would be proudly secular while upholding the rights of people to believe and espouse any religious view they might enjoy. Wars would be relatively passé and the military would primarily be a place where those with little means could earn their way through college, by serving the peacetime needs of the country. Unions would protect the wages of working people, and their wealth would allow them to live better lives. Corporations would be regulated so that they would neither become monopolies nor run roughshod over government and the general public. The natural environment would be seen as a precious gem that sustains all life and would be treated with reverence. Science would advance to create new methods of creating fuels to heat and move people from one place to another. Nuclear power would be abandoned for safer technologies like solar power.

None of this has come to pass. In fact, this description of the past, and what I believed would be the natural outgrowth of the policies and politics of the 1960s seems almost like I am describing a socialist state and not the capitalistic US.

Social Security has been raided and is on the verge of being destroyed. Housing for the poor is decrepit where it is not nonexistent. Welfare has been cut. Public schools provide educations roundly thought to be sub-par. There is no national health care system, and the poor are mostly without any care. Even the emergency rooms they could once count on to help them are being closed, for lack of money, at many hospitals across the nation. Racism, sexism and homophobia are rampant. The crisis in the poor, black South, the Christian Right’s attack on women’s rights and their equally virulent attack on gays who want to marry are proof of that. The federal government is more openly religious, and conservatively religious at that than it has been for half a century. Wars are now fought because we want to, not out of necessity. The poor still enter military service in the hope that they will find a better life, but now, more often, end up as cannon fodder for the government. Unions are embattled, if not dead. In fact, the current president has done nothing but enact laws that enslave the working classes to corporate bosses. And the corporations are so unregulated that they are able to exploit the poor as well as monetarily defraud the nation as a whole. It is common knowledge that they buy legislators to make sure that, as entities, they are unfettered in their profit-making. The environment is being degraded more each day and, for the first time in decades, there is talk of building new nuclear power plants. The only new fuel being talked about these days is hydrogen, which no one has figured out how to produce or distribute easily or cheaply. Meanwhile, Americans drive cars that use more gasoline than ever before, eroding the last stores of oil on earth — stores for which the US sends children to fight and die to acquire. Hell, even museums aren’t free anymore.

This is not the world to which I was looking forward. This is not a forward-thinking world in the least. In fact, if the Enlightenment was time when educated people rejected traditional religious and political ideals, then this return to pre-WWII values can be likened to a return to the Dark Ages. All we need now are the witch trials?