anne's dispatches from sydney

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 Dear everyone,

hi from Montreal.

I just wanted to send you all some commentary on New Orleans. I have sat at my laptop, at uni, becoming very upset about it all. However, this tragedy reveals a lot about the American condition, and its underbelly, and the government's callousness towards its own people.

I noticed a lot of these characteristics whilst there for a month on the way to Canada.

Namely, the politics of race, class and physical mobility. In LA, I noticed decay, and destitution from the standpoint of a pedestrian wandering the streets, and a culture of 'convenience' if you own a car (and can afford to run it).

This is all familiar, especially living in Sydney where mobility and race are regionally polarised- in many regions of Sydney you can only get to places conveniently if you own a car. When my family moved to Lane Cove from Strathfield a few years ago, I was surprised at how disempowered I felt at not having a regular train station nearby. However in Sydney, physical mobility is not as starkly polarised according to wealth as in the US.

However in the US, you notice it everywhere. Mobility is power and privilege.
Those who died in New Orleans were those who were too elderly, disabled or poor to travel out before the hurricane. Imagine not having $30 for a greyhound bus seat for each member of your family to leave the region. You just band together and hope for the best. As Michael Parenti writes in an article below, this is the free market, individualist ideology- if you can't fend for yourself and pay your way, then bad luck.

Parenti contrasts the American situation with a similar event in Cuba. Cuba recently evacuated 1.3 million people from a powerful hurricane zone. Nobody died. This is not just because of a so-called 'strong government' but also because of neighbourhood organisations were empowered to co-ordinate the operation, and also a community ethic of care, where an old person would never be left behind to die.

The politics of mobility again...When I was in LA, the Greyhound Bus station was located in the worst part of town. Everyone knows it is only for the poor people. Even in the middle of the day, my room mates in Hollywood were extremely protective of me, and accompanied me there. On this bus from LA to San Francisco, the people were 60% black, and most of the white people were poor and overweight, whereas on the plane from San Francisco to Chicago, the people were 80% white and well dressed.

Mobility has been a consistent theme... with my US leg of the trip culminating in the Woodward dream cruise through the main street of the run down, post-industrial Detroit in a biodiesel bus, with a banner saying 'Cruis'n aint easy at $3 a gallon. Oil is over. Drive the future'.

[In the next few weeks I would like to read about the politics of physical mobility more. Such a politics has been trailblazed by disabled activists, who have felt the most marginalisation in this way.]

In New Orleans, the authorities encouraged many strong, able-bodied people on the streets to get out of New Orleans. However, couldn't these people have been co-ordinated to take responsibility for particular nursing homes, making sure that all the elderly and disabled people escaped safely?

Anyway, here is some collected commentary on the New Orleans disaster that I have gathered today.
It has the feeling of a quasi-apocalyptic event. With oil prices so high- you start to think of peak oil and everything- my friend Cameron said to me 'what if you can't get home next year- what if oil has become so expensive that you can't fly?'

makes you think of going off and building a self- sufficient urban commune...

Anne

Here are the articles.

posted by: anneinchaosland at 21:50 | link | comments |

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