New Orleans mayor praises post-Katrina change

The Louisiana governor hopeful also outlined his proposal to curb the New Orleans murder epidemic. “A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops”, I get a little angry.

“For these reasons, execution of those offenders who committed capital felonies prior to April 25, 2012, would violate the state constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment”.

Along the 150-mile-wide delta, people are leaving generations-old homesteads and moving behind the newly fortified levees.

McQueary published a new piece on Friday titled “McQueary: Hurricane Katrina and what was in my heart”.

“There is no balance to her idealized perception of a utopian New Orleans where corruption, overspending, and waste (to her mind, in the form of “unnecessary” city employees) have been thoroughly uprooted”.

The piece, later hastily renamed “Chicago, New Orleans, and rebirth”, after a torrent of criticism rained down on both the Trib and McQueary on social media, first wished that Chicago would see its own Katrina-level disaster, and was later updated to explain that we need a metaphorical disaster to wipe away the rot and corruption inside city government.

At the threshold of the 10th storm season since Katrina, it would be too much to say categorically that New Orleans is “back” from the worst urban catastrophe in modern American history.

But I might have been able to forgive her for her misguided and Ayn-Rand-esque idealizing of my hometown, if she had not simultaneously idealized and glossed-over the depth of suffering and pain that so many New Orleanians went through-including myself. Landrieu has been criticized for not initially hiring more police officers, but he points to a city near bankruptcy with a $100 million deficit when he took over and expensive court-mandated reforms: “We literally had to lay off and furlough citizens”.

McQueary needs an education in white privilege.

“I think that’s a good start to make sure we sustain TOPS (Taylor Opportunity Program) well into the future”, Vitter said. She then could read books by Lisa Delpit, Theresa Perry, Beverly Daniel-Tatum, Howard Zinn, Bell Hooks, Ta-Nehisi Coates and many more authors. How does she account for people left scrounging for food, those hiding out in their attics until the murky waters consumed them? I used the hurricane as a metaphor for the urgent and dramatic change needed in Chicago: at City Hall, at the Chicago City Council, at Chicago Public Schools. I am working on always speaking up when I hear any type of racist comment.

Hurricanes speed up that disappearance and Morales, one of the few remaining fisherman to still call Delacroix home, knows that another Katrina could be the end of his town. Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking.